June, 2005
vindicated

Those of us who continue to cling to items that should properly have found their way to the trash long ago receive more than our fair share of criticism. We frequently hear how we clutter our homes and our lives for no good reason. Normal people, we're told, throw things away.

And of course we know that this is true, but don't want to admit to being so incurably abnormal. The problem is that we can't bring ourselves to do the "normal" thing. But occasionally we're blessed with those brief moments of vindication when suddenly we've got just the right item for a particular task - and all because we didn't listen to those normal people who wanted us to unload our excess baggage. A moment such as this graced me on a recent family vacation.


Though I don't throw things away, there are also many items that I don't accumulate at all - shoes for instance. We expected that we would be in lots of mud, and that mud threatened to be ruinous to my single pair of sandals (that also serve as my only shoes). What was I to do?

Normal people, of course, wouldn't be faced with such a predicament. They've have additional shoes, including a semi-functional older pair. But all I had was a pair of sandals that had almost totally fallen to pieces - a pair that was waiting just for a moment such as this - a moment, I should add - similar to another, longer moment of vindication. I packed them.

As we neared our muddy place, I switched to my old sandals. They fell almost completely fell during the rather short trek before reaching our destination, but just the same, they served their purpose wonderfully. Falling apart completely and totally only after I'd gotten one last necessary wear out of them.