Things and Stuff: I threw away a family photo while I was cleaning

While sifting out papers in a banker's box, I came across a loose photo and the memories it brought back were not good. 

I really don't know what I was thinking of when I chose those eyeglasses frames, but the real reason I tossed the photo, after brief consideration, is that it just reminded me of a holiday visit that didn't go so well. Not that most of them did, and that holiday wasn't unbearably awful, but it's painful to remember how people were trying to seem happy, and no one was. 

Tossing a photo, even one that isn't full of happy memories, is a big thing for me because I have so few. And this was my doing, though I'll never know if I unsconsciously did it on purpose or not. In January of 1988, the house where I had a duplex apartment caught on fire while I was at work, and only a few items were salvaged. Two weeks before the fire, I'd gone to Hook's drugstore and bought three or four vinyl photo albums, and I'd carefully removed nearly every photograph I had from the one of the two manila envelopes in my metal file cabinet and I'd placed each picture into an album. I felt great satisfaction at now having a highly-flammable pile of plastic-encased memories on top of that file cabinet. Everything inside the metal office drawers was in pretty good shape, with just a little singing of edges because of the metal heating up like a griddle during the more flaming parts of the catastrophe.

Did I know that cleansing fire was coming to rid me of my past, and was I making sure that the photos went in the conflagration? It's been 33 years and I still don't know. 

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