single-use, but still around?

Some playthings just aren't made to be kept. Nobody expects a child's coloring book to become filled with great art. If we want to color those same pages again we're going to have to plan ahead and photocopy those pages before we color them.

Yet once again, once something is saved, it's hard to break the chain, to decide that there really isn't any reason to save it. At first the boys resisted throwing out this coloring book because the superheroes in it, though not exactly identifiable, were similar enough to those that interested them so that they wanted to save the pictures. Once they'd lost interest I found something fascinating in a Polish language coloring book which found its way to us in some inexplicable, or at least fully forgotten, fashion.

A similar process seems to be involved in a stick-em book that certainly can't be reused, nor passed on to anyone else. At first the pictures are too good to part with, but that argument hardly holds if we never open the book. But once the book gets opened ... hey, those pictures are great, maybe we can use them for something else sometimes! And yet another supposedly disposable item keeps its place on the shelf.


  To: growing up
To: A Digitized Life - main page