WHAT'S LEFT BEHIND
"celebrating mom's birthday". Jan. 19, 1958
I posted back in June about how my old high school Latin teacher passed away. He was, by far, the most formative adult presence I knew as a high school student...you know how people always reminisce about "that one teacher that changed your life"? Well, that was him for me and a lot of other students.
I actually set up a memorial blog (so 00s!) for him.
Mr. Shickle was an incredible pack rat and collector of minutiae. He had more Franklin Mint stuff and commerative plates and small figurines than you can shake a stick at. He owned 500 boxes worth of books (no joke) because he was a member of dozens of book-of-the-month clubs, not to mention stacks and stacks of magazines. It's hard to catalog all the random stuff he had but I was at his old house the other day and there's things like old Polaroid land cameras, super-8 cameras, a few dozen old board games, it's difficult to even know where to begin.
I was going through his old belongings the other day as part of the process of helping clean out the house before it goes up for auction and I was drawn to all the photos, postcards, letters and stamps he collected. LIke I said, he was a pack rat and he was almost 80 when he passed so he had decades of stuff accumulated. And what I was thinking, in thumbing through all this was: with no family to pass this onto (he had no next-of-kin), what happens to all these accumulated memories? All these scraps of random flotsam that we keep, thinking that it may matter one day? And what does it mean that what we really leave behind are just drawers full of old clipped out stamps and slides and photos and postcards and letters that have no inherent sentimental value left insofar as everyone surrounding them, included in them are likely dead?
So...I don't know. Maybe I just wanted to do something small to rail against the inevitable oblivion. Maybe I just felt like some of this should survive for reasons I can't even articulate. I took a small envelope of old stamps and a small box of slides and I decided to scan some of it in to put on Mr. Shickle's memorial blog. Snapshots (literally) from the past.
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