On Things Kept...

Oct 8, 2014
4 min read

I’d opened the photo album many times over the last twenty years, never noticing what was hiding in its pages. It slid out of the album and out of its clear plastic sheath. The handwritten label, in Drew’s unmistakeable all-caps scroll said simply: “MOVIES”. For a moment, I wondered if my old Macintosh SE/30 was still tucked away somewhere in my parents’ stockpile of outdated things. I’d watched Drew’s animated movies on that Mac back in high school. But it wasn’t in my parents’ house. It wasn’t anywhere. It only existed in my memory.

I have a feeling Drew would have loved the world we live in now. With the “cutting edge” technology he had access to in the late ’80s and early ’90s, his playfulness, creativity and technological skill had found its perfect venue in the world of computers. When he died in 1994, Drew was studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and the brink of the digital tipping point was just moments away. Nicholas Negroponte had been writing for Wired for a couple of years already and, within a year, he’d publish Being Digital, the tome that forecasted our now commonplace interactive digital world. But Drew, who as a teenager made gray-scale pixellated line animations of snowboard races and cartoon scenes of robberies of the local store where a group of us worked after school, never got to experience the era Negroponte saw looming ahead of us. Drew never got to do a Google search or upgrade his smartphone. And we’ll never know what he’d have thought of Facebook or the ways in which he’d maximize that platform to make it ten times cooler. Because that’s what he did with just about everything. Had he not left the world in 1994, perhaps he’d have been among those leading the charge in this new age. We’ll never know.

I had to train myself to not keep things. It took a while. I packed and unpacked my way through my late teens and early twenties. The summer before my senior year in college, I moved four times in three months. I remember the line of cars behind me as I lurched uphill in first gear on the Tufts University campus, the inside of my 1980 Toyota Corolla stuffed to its pleathery limits with milk crates full of cassette tapes and posters scarred with adhesive. A year later, I schlepped my stuff all the way to New York, where square footage was limited, forcing hard decisions. I parted with beloved books. I culled my movie poster collection. I opted not to take my most sentimental items with me. Scrapbooks and photo albums stayed in a closet at my parents’ house. By the time I moved from New York to Los Angeles in 2001, I was an expert at letting go of old stuff. My desire to keep every letter and card had finally given way to a new ritual: reading them, giving them a kiss and tossing all but a precious few into the trash.

I had to work hard to let go of stuff because I don’t come from people who let go of stuff easily. My parents still live in the house where I grew up. My father built the house himself in 1960 on land that was a wedding gift from my mother’s father and they’ve lived there ever since. When you walk through the house, it’s quite obvious they’ve absorbed more objects than they’ve purged over the last five decades. They leave things unchanged for years. If you look closely at the brick fireplace, for instance, you can see where my brothers and sisters wrote their names on a few of the bricks in chalk. “I never had the heart to erase them,” my mom says.

When we visit now, we stay in the bedroom that was my haven as a teenager. I’ve changed some things. It’s not quite as brimming with my adolescent obsessions, but the books I read in high school and college are still on the shelves in a familiar pattern. My Albert Einstein poster still watches over us. The junk drawer in the kitchen? It still holds the same screwdrivers, electrical tape and coils of wire that were there when I was a kid. Although I’ve worked hard to purge my own stuff and often wished my parents would let go of at least some of the layers of history, I’m secretly thankful they haven’t. I know it’s rare in this time of rapid change, this time of upgrades and reboots, to go back to something that’s been there for a while. There are fewer of these places left and, as the years go by, I feel their specialness more fully because I am all too aware of their impermanence. Sometimes it’s okay to admit what’s been kept is not always a weight and what’s let go of is not always lost…and what a gift it is to create something, even something silly, that could be here after I’m gone.

***

The disk was successfully opened by Adam Rosen at Vintage Mac Museum this week. He’s working on getting the video files into a format we can watch. In the meantime, he sent me a screenshot of some of Drew’s commentary on the films: