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May, 2004:
going way, way back
It's pretty much in the nature of saving things that much of what
gets saved is also forgotten. Of course at first it's only misplaced,
or neglected, or simply stashed away somewhere in order to make
room for more things which we want to save - or more to the point,
don't yet want to throw away.
Because of this it's bound to happen that sometimes we find things
which we had no idea that we'd saved, or why we may have saved them,
or even how it is that we did. And we usually find these items when
we're looking for something else, which is, of course, what happened
to me.
Somewhere, within piles of other materials that probably also contain
items I never expect to find, nor even remember that I've saved,
I found a large plastic bag of items that date back from well before
my move to Israel 32 years ago. Some of the items in that bag are
definitely the sort of thing which I'd save - for no particular
reason other than the fact that I wouldn't want to throw them out.
But for the most part what I find strangest about this grab bag
of items is that most of them aren't items that I'd feel any urge
to save. In addition, it's hard for me to imagine that I would have
shipped these from the States to Israel when I moved - it makes
more sense that somewhere along the line these were mailed to me,
though I can't figure out why someone might have done that either.
Interestingly, most of the items in the bag date back to childhood
- the latest among them seems to date from the 9th grade. I would
have forgotten about them well before I left the States - and I probably
did. But instead of casting them out, it appears that I cast them
into a drawer, and one way or another, they found their way back to
me. Why, upon receiving them (assuming that I didn't bring them with
me) I didn't throw them out is a rather simple, though ultimately
tautological, question to answer: If they've been saved for
so long, there must have been a reason.
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