The Great Purge

This time I am determined not to move with any boxes that say “miscellaneous” or worse, “to sort.”  Last time we moved with a BAG, a PAPER BAG, that carried the contents of our “utility” drawer (you might call yours a “junk” drawer, but we are just too high-class for that).  Guess when I finally got around to sorting it?  A week after we moved?  A year?  How about yesterday?  Good news, though: we found Attic Man’s long lost headlamp.  He’s been wearing it around the house like a fool.

Then there are the files I have been carrying around since before we were married.  I just shredded a batch of pay stubs from high school.  And my SAT scores, and records for cars we no longer own, and records from bank accounts that are no longer active, and stubs from bills we paid five years ago…

But it gets worse.  There are the journals starting from 1991.  There is the diary that I started in third grade (I’ll sum it up for you: I heart Robby!  Robby is mean.  I hope Robby asks me out.  Robby asked me out.  I heart Robby!  Robby doesn’t heart me.  Robby does heart me!  I heart Robby!).  There is a letter I wrote “to my future husband” at 15, and the letter I wrote “to my future daughter” when I was 16.  And it’s all about boys.  Boyfriends, friends that were boys, friends that were boys that I wished were boyfriends, friends that were boys that used to be boyfriends, but always boys.  And my “walk with the Lord.”  It all makes me want to wretch, mostly because I am not in it anywhere.  They are other peoples’ phrases all jumbled up in a way that was supposed to fit my reality but never did.

Let me give you an example.  A highly journaled event in my life was my second trip to the Creation Festival, an event that initially boasted that it was the Christian Woodstock.  It featured bands and speakers that warned against premarital sex and the danger of the New World Order.  You camped up on the hill and came down to the stage for all of the events.  It was an excellent opportunity to mingle with the opposite sex in a semi-supervised fashion.  Anyway, most of the music was bad, in retrospect. There were always a few exceptions, however.  One of them was a band called Degarmo & Key.  They had recently taken a turn in their music toward, um, actual music.  I remember being blown away by an opening instrumental that involved a long jam.  I was mesmerized, and turned to one of our adult leaders, who just happened to be an accomplished if sheltered musician.  Wide-eyed, I said, “this is incredible!”  Shaking her head and throwing up her hands before folding her arms tersely she complained, “yeah, but where’s the message“?  Later I was to sum up D & K’s performance with a single line: “too much rock, not enough talk.”  I must not have bought into the bullshit as completely as I let on in my journal, because what I remember most clearly is that it was incomprehensible to me that Jesus didn’t like a good jam and that it wasn’t OK for a musician to just shut up and let it flow.  If you want to know why Christian music always has been and always will be largely bad, this is the reason.  I’m not knocking the artists themselves.  Consider D&K; if this woman’s reaction was the norm (and it was) do you think they’d be invited back for “too much rock, not enough talk”?  Or do you think they might have to modify the way they produce their music to a certain extent to the huge moneybath that is the Christian right?  It’s far more nuanced than that but you get the picture.  So that’s who I was: churchspeak and not much else.  At least that of me that was on paper.

There were a few journals from when I was at the end of high school and into college that were genuinely interesting and sounded more like me.  I spent a few hours with them, mostly grieving the things I’ve lost since then.  It was a struggle to get rid of them.  I felt viscerally that I would have been throwing away myself to thow away these journals, that somehow I would forget if I didn’t have the words down to remember what happened…and that I would lose people I’d lost physically forever.  But then I realized that I had lost them anyway.  So I said goodbye to the old me and tossed them along with the I Heart Robby journals.

I feel lighter.