Archaeology

Not too long ago, my wife and I spent several days sifting through her Father's assembled — stuff, that's probably the best word for it. He's more than 90 years old by now, and I think he's saved something from each and every day of those many years, and that stuff has all found its' way into the corners, and closets, and shelves of a very old house. (He hasn't spent the entire 90 years there, but from the amount of clutter, you'd sure think he had.)

It's not a case of compulsive hoarding, not by any means, and not everything has been saved indiscriminately (though that seems to have been more the case as time went on). But it's as though he emptied his metaphorical pockets from time to time, kept what seemed important or interesting, and there always seemed to be something important or interesting.

It was the boxes and bins of assorted papers, some going as far back as the 1940s, that require the most attention. Particularly the boxes from the eaves of the top floor, a long, narrow hallway along one side of the house leading to an unused office. The roof is leaking around the chimney (the house has been unoccupied, so this had gone unnoticed for several months), and several boxes (and their contents) have become damp, even moldy as a result. (A few plastic bins of papers and whatever else are now full of standing water, and we haven't had the chance to go through them.)

So it became a more urgent matter, to find anything of historical or sentimental value before any further harm could come to it — especially family photos. Several photo albums had already been damaged by water, though the photos contained in them were, thankfully, intact. Other photos have been carelessly and indifferently stored and all but forgotten — hidden among correspondence and magazine clippings and postcards and an airline boarding pass (from the 1950s!) and mimeographed pages from fanzines and I-don't-know-what-else.

And so much of it was of interest, because it was so old — and often so unexpected. A 1953 letter from a friend overseas who had fallen on hard times, along with the receipt for $1,000 sent to him by telegraph. A postcard with one single line, commenting on the recent death of an well-known author, but with no indication of who that author might have been. Newspaper clippings. Press passes. Business cards. A ticket to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field.

And we were obliged to look through all of it, every last scrap. It wasn't like an archaeological dig, where objects of interest from a given era were in close proximity with one another, or at least followed some sort of reasonable progression as you dig deeper. Something of value might be hidden just about anywhere. School class photos from the 1930s were found, inexplicably (though beautifully preserved) in a random plastic bin among what seemed to be junk mail and magazines from the late 1980s. We'd have a second look at boxes we had already sorted through, or thought we had sorted through, only to find something unforgettable we'd somehow missed. The discoveries were exciting and gratifying, but the fear that we've overlooked something of value is maddening.

The photos were still in good condition, more or less the same condition they had probably been in for decades. The color prints had faded, but the black-and-white prints hadn't — even the paper hardly seemed to have aged.

And that got me thinking. My son, and his children, and generations going forward, they may never have the opportunity for discoveries like these. Most photos these days are taken and stored in a digital format, and probably won't offer the amazing experience of sifting through a box of ephemera and stumbling across an uexpected photographic print that's fifty, or sixty, or even seventy years old. And digital files can't be stored so indifferently — they'll need maintenance, much more maintenance, if for no other reason than to make sure they're in a format that current technology (whatever it is) can still access. I can't imagine they'll withstand the ill effects of a leaky roof as gracefully.