I never mind cleaning house of stuff that's been hanging around in closets, the attic, the garage or basement for unseemly numbers of years. It's usually just a matter of getting Jan's permission--she's not exactly a pack rat, but she is much more the optimist about how likely we are to find a use for an item--and out it goes.
Now, I have of late been contemplating the incredible evolution of media technology as it impacts the upper reaches and back corners of a coat closet in the central hall (hell, the only hall!) of the house. While I am quick to embrace the new, I find myself oddly reluctant to just chuck out the old. I have no attachment whatsoever to most of the consumer electronics I've accumulated in my adult life, nor am I sentimental about musical selections just because I remember owning the vinyl or the cassette tape. But I do hesitate to banish some particular devices and "software" that seem basic to my sense of hearth and home.
Of course, I'd be a fool to send my childhood View Master and all those stereoptical discs to the charity thrift store, when someone who owns an antiques and collectables shop will just nab them up and put them out for sale. That's just logic. More curious, though, is why I'm still hanging onto a perfectly operable Bell & Howell 8-mm movie projector, a Kodak Carousel slide projector, and a classic Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder.
My first line of defense here would be that these are the devices one would need to play (or display) the accumulated home movies, slides, and audio tapes of the Clouse Family Archives. The collection, though, is not vast and not really irreplaceable. I long ago culled out the important gems among the home movies and had them professionally transferred to video tape--first Beta format, then VHS, and finally to DVD. Those that remain solely on 8-mm film--safely stored at a constant temperature in metal boxes--are, alas, painfully boring and amateurish records of So Cal mountain scenery, fields of wildflowers, and tedious Pasadena Rose Parades past. It was torture to watch these as a child, and I can't imagine plaguing myself with them in my old age.
The Carousel slide projector, of course, has only more recently been made obsolete. I've always believed a collection of transparencies--great photos or not--were rather useless if stored in the little boxes they arrived in from the photo processors. I kept them, instead, sorted and carefully labeled in ready-to-go carousel trays, neatly lined up in chronological order on the shelf of our guest coat closet, with the projector and screen nearby. We looked at several trays worth of camping trips from the 60s, just before we took a summer trip there a few years ago. I should scan, digitize, and label the whole mess--er, collection--but something tells me that would be the last time I ever bother to look at these pictures. Do I really want to spend the time alloted to me on this planet with this sort of endeavor?
And the audio tapes are an even easier call. I've long since re-recorded or replaced any music on them that I have an attachment to--even the few records of dorm-room guitar and vocal sessions with a friend at UCSB from an era when Bob Dylan had only a couple albums of his own to his name. Unfortunately, I never got around to transferring the rare snippets of my parents' and grandparents' voices on those tapes, but otherwise, I'd have a hard time explaining why I'm hanging on to all those spools of magnetized acetate.
I won't even get into the VHS recorder boxed up under our bed, or the brilliantly designed Bang & Olufsen stereo receiver and tangential tracking turntable in the attic.
I've come to realize that it's not a matter of how cool or remarkable the technology was to begin with, how much good I'll get out of it in the future, or even how much I could get for it on Ebay (the $600 turnable, pictured right, can be had for $9.99, I see). I just have to decide how much I choose to be ruled by nostalgia or feelings perhaps best defined as the "Rosebud factor." I really do feel closer to my father--who died 40 years ago this winter--when I thread-up that old Bell & Howell and curse its complexity as he did when I was a child. And every once in a while in those washed-out movies of Red Rock Canyon I can catch a glimpse of our family's dark blue ’50 Ford--our first "new car" ever--and I almost want to cry. But wallowing in memories works only every 25 years or so. The second or third annual stroll down memory lane tends to be quite unmoving. For the most part, this stuff is just taking up space. We have no intention of moving up to some larger abode at this point, so every square foot of storage space is at a premium. We either make room for new arrivals or curtail the urge to collect. Fortunately, the blessing of the digital age is that any future accumulation of music, family snapshots, and treasured correspondence can be stored on hard drives and other high density media (present-day or yet-to-be-developed). The very concept of storage space has changed in a revolutionary way.
I just don't know if I can summarily dump the stuff that will forever take up three-dimensional space in the house and carry emtional weight in my heart.
