My brother tells me how his son throws things out when they no longer work. There's no asking "Could it be fixed?" It's just abandoned, then replaced if it can be afforded. At other times something's thrown out simply because there's no apparent immediate use for it. This attitude bewilders me.
I have lots and lots of stuff that's older than this teenager (I have shirts older than he is). I have stuff that's older than me, or my parents. Some of it works, some could be repaired and, to be honest, a fair amount is just junk. Yet if I can spare the storage space, I keep it on. I even find myself buying more stuff with no apparent immediate use, almost solely for the purposes of preservation.
Recently I bought an old, working, Imperial typewriter for a few dollars. At the same time I bought a box of film gear - some Super 8 movie projectors and accessories. I've already had what I consider to be my money's worth in playing with these items. The sound and feel of a manual typewriter is something that will soon be alien to my nephew's generation; I suspect the Super 8 movie already is. I really don't know what he or his younger siblings would make of the home movies that came with the projectors. They're silent, showing complete strangers doing mundane things in the typical Australian suburban milieu of the 1960s. I find them fascinating and poignant but doubt if these 21st century kids would last a minute's bewildered viewing before drifting away to their iPods and Playstations.
Does it really matter? I think it does: the past should not be abandoned.
Many years ago - I was probably aged twelve or so - during a roadside cleanup in my neighbourhood an enormous pile of stuff appeared outside the house in which "the weird old lady" lived. It turned out she'd died and someone - presumably a near relative - had come and cleared out the house and simply dumped everything unwanted out on the kerb. My brothers and I quickly laid claim to the bulk of it and made some amazing "scores".
What soon dawned on us was that an entire life now lay in a pile out on the street. Clothing, books, mementoes - everything not of immediate value - had been discarded. We extracted what we could from it before the rain and the council destroyed it all. For my part I eventually devoted myself to recovering the diaries this spinster had kept from the 1930s to 1970s. I have most of them still, though some have been lost during various moves of my own over the years. I consider them not only a record of a forgotten life but the eventful times in which it was lived - mundane details too easily overlooked amongst world-shattering events. (My hope is that some day I will have the time to transcribe these diaries as the kernel of a minor history of Australian suburbanite culture in the first half of the twentieth century.)
I suppose the point I'm making is "Don't throw anything out" if you can spare the space. You never know when it may come in handy again or become totally desirable and/or collectable.
A case in point: in my university days I somewhere/somehow picked up a Roland SH-101 analog synthesiser. These days you can get software that reproduces it on your PC but the original units are now very desirable and being used by many of the significant popular musicians of the here and now. My nephew is a very talented drummer and his band is not just a garage one. One day they may feel the need for the 'phat' sounds of an SH-101 but until he shows a lot more respect for the past and the artifacts that represent it, he's got no chance of laying his grubby paws on it. He is further handicapped in this respect by the fact that he destroyed a pair of speakers and sub-woofer I once lent him and showed total indifference about doing so.
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