Rogue Archivist

I come by my desire to save things naturally. Pa, my dad's dad, turned 91 in 2018, and he has so many things -- both from years ago and from last week. He has farmed, usually part time since there's so little money to be made in it, for most of his life, and his yard is like a derelict museum trying to pay homage to long unused farm equipment but without the wherewithal for any real upkeep, its museum director doing little more than occasionally moving artifacts around to make room for new pieces. Inside the house I'm convinced he has every flashlight he's ever bought or been given, and as a rural farmer-mechanic there's been a lot of those. Truth be told, I'm probably exaggerating about the flashlights, but my family also collects exaggerations. Besides, he might not have every single flashlight, but he has most of them. He's not a hoarder like those people so often fetishized and simultaneously mocked on reality tv shows. He keeps a lot of things, many of them of little to no use, but he also throws things away. It's just that he does more of the former than the latter. I like this about him.

A few years ago they got what I guess you'd call curbside trash pickup out where I grew up. I'm hemming and hawing here because I'm not sure if it is still called "curbside pickup" if the nearest curb is at least a five minute drive and even then you have to drive another fifteen minutes to get to consistently appearing curbs. Either way, Pa now how trash pickup similar to what we are used to in cities, but when we were kids everyone used to load their trash in a car or truck and haul it to the nearest set of large green trash dumpsters. The closest ones to us were off the side of the road in the corner of a field. Pa's use of these dumpsters was often transactional in that he'd leave his trash and return with a bike or that time when he brought home a pair of crutches. High off the ground as you tossed your own trash in from the back of a pickup truck it was easy to see inside the dark dumpsters to the treasures that other people had tossed out, and I guess it was just too good to resist sometimes. I understand how that must have felt. I feel it sometimes when I'm out walking my dog Joliff on trash days, passing piles of perfectly good plastic milk crates or knocked around but functional wooden stools. I've brought home my fair share of finds from people's personal trash heaps and would probably bring home more if I didn't have an irrational fear of bedbugs.

Recently, Pa rescued two giant stuffed animals -- the kind almost big enough to qualify for the use of HOV commuter lanes -- from my aunt's trashcans. He gave them to my seven year old nephew Anthony who, barely big enough to really be able to carry them, tucked the horse into my dad's bed with its head resting on daddy's pillow and its body covered by a sheet. It was both sweet and reminiscent of The Godfather. The thing is, Pa's decision to pick that horse and its gorilla friend out of the trash was a good one. Anthony really liked and appreciated them, and if nothing else the laughs we all got from that horse's head were worth it.

I don't know why Pa saves stuff. I think it has to do with not wanting to waste things and this vague feeling that something could be useful in the future. I might be projecting, though, since both of those feelings are tucked firmly into my own squishy insides. There is something important to me about keeping things, about having a physical connection to other people and to my own past self. This has taken several forms for me from saving my own family's photographic history to working to archive local LGBTQ history in the corner of the state where I grew up. I don't have formal training in oral history collection or archival preservation methods, so I sometimes feel like a fraud, but I remind myself that a thing done imperfectly is better than a thing left undone. That usually helps for a few minutes, and then I get distracted by old photographs or thirty year old articles from Norfolk's old gay and lesbian newspaper, and I forget to keep worrying.

In this age of minimalist living, in a time when wealth is associated with sparseness that the middle class is desperately trying to mimic, people who save things get a bum rap. Everyone is always looking for the next thing to throw away. Digitize your music and toss out the cds, get rid of old paperwork, scan photos, cull, trim, toss, cleanse, repeat. We talk incessantly about the "burden of things" while we ignore the burden of living up to unrealistic minimalist expectations. As we once believed that a new knick knack might make us feel better, less anxious, less unhappy, we now believe that clearing the clutter and The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up will make us feel better, less anxious, less unhappy. I'm doubtful of either solution, but what worries me about the latter is that we are throwing out our own personal and collective histories. Of course we don't think we are. We think we're just decluttering, but sometimes the value of a thing -- a humble piece of paper, for example -- isn't clear until much later. I'm glad that someone kept brochures from ODU's Gay and Lesbian Student Union because I can thumb through those archival boxes in the library now. I'm glad that Granny made us pose for those pictures, taking forever to compose the picture while we waited and waited, because I know what every single Christmas for the entirety of my life, looked like in that house.

These things mean something to me. I can't always express what that is or why I feel so strongly about them, but I can always, always feel their importance to me. Maybe you'll find them important, or at least mildly interesting, too.

Granny, my dad's mom, saved family memories. She took pictures at every holiday and family reunion and impromptu get together. Memories of my dad, uncle, aunts, sisters, cousins, great aunts and uncles, second cousins, and so many extended family are saved for us because she took pictures, got them developed, and then stored them away -- all over the place. She made albums, taping photographs into them, overlapping them sometimes because there were so many, and obviously positioning and repositioning them in various places and albums as evidenced by their tape scars. She stored them in boxes, in a basket in the top lefthand side of her bedroom closet, under the bed in metal lock boxes, and in their developing envelopes here and there around the house. They are a treasure, and I've made it my mission to scan them for the family. It's a huge project, though, that I can only get to between work projects, so my progress is slow but steady. I have to admit, though, that I like it that way because it means I still have some of her left. She died in 2016, suddenly, so none of us was really prepared to be without her, and it's still weird to me that she isn't here. Making my way through her photographs with the hope of finding ones I haven't seen before makes her feel a little more present. Thus, I've given myself the title of Rhodes Family Archivist and as Pa saves discarded stuffed horses, I am trying to make sure that everyone has digital copies of the family's photographic past.