The Things You Keep

I am moving in a couple of weeks. So I'm packing boxes and making decisions about what gets moved and what doesn't. It's always a time of revisiting the past too as one decides what to throw away and what to keep.

I had already done a fair amount of purging before I started packing to move. In preparing my house for sale, I cleaned out closets and stored away a bunch of things to make my house seem bigger and cleaner. So some of my memory lane has already been traversed.

But today I found another treasure trove. A stack of magazines and newspapers that, at one point, had meaning in my life. Here's the inventory:

- Newspaper section of the Washington Post from 1/1/2000 about the change in the millenium
- The Opinion section of the Washington Post from the turn of the millenium
- George magazine's tribute to its fallen founder, John Kennedy Jr.
- The Industry Standard from 1999 with a list of the top IPOs, one of which was a company I had worked for
- The front section of the Washington Post from September 12, 2001
- A Washington Post magazine's special edition of views from all around the city

I kept the special section on the millenium. I'm not sure I'll ever look at it again, but it's an interesting piece of history. I kept the WP from 9/12/01. Again, it's a look at history. I don't personally know anyone who was killed, thank goodness. But I know people who do and I certainly still remember the horror of that day. I kept the George magazine too. I'm not sure why, but I remember that magazine quite fondly. It was a fresh take on politics at a time when I was involved to some extent in my work at Hart Research. I never had much of a crush on John Kennedy Jr., but I appreciated his position in history, which tragically became even more significant with his death. Finally, I kept the Industry Standard. Not so much because of the IPO from a company with which I no longer have any affiliation, but because of that era in the Internet's history. 1999 was a time of great change in our technological history. And so I thought the magazine would be interesting for that reason.

The things you keep. No really good reason for my keeping any of these items. And yet, I couldn't bear to throw them away. Until the next move...