Rant #3,667: Leaving It All Behind

Being confined to bed for such a long time forced me to put off various activities until I was ready to move about as my left leg strengthened.

Over the past year or so, I did just about everything that I couldn't do when I was laid up, everything from driving a car to going food shopping to seeing my son play basketball and bowl.

But as I checked off things from my list of things I wanted to get back to doing, there was still one thing I hadn't done, all these months later.

I had never been to our storage unit, where we are keeping a lot of our "stuff" because the apartment we moved to was way too small to hold everything.

Well, I can now cross that activity off my list, because on Friday afternoon, I finally visited our storage unit, going there with my wife.

The storage building is just about a mile away from where we currently live, but it may as well have been on the other side of the world, because I hadn't seen any of the things stored there for the past 18 months or so.

We have so much stored there that is very important to us, including my LP collection, books, photo albums, larger photos, family heirlooms, etc.

And I hadn't seen any of them in a long time.

So close, yet so far.

The place where we have all of this stuff stored is quite modern and quite nice.

You need a code to get your car in through the gates, and once inside the building, you need a key to get into the unit.

And the whole place is climate controlled, and the air conditioning was on when we were there.

When we moved to our apartment, we had a major problem with the original movers, and with our original storage facility.

We had to move our things to another facility, and our things ended up where they are now.

The original movers damaged or destroyed some of our things--including the plastic receptacles that many of these things were placed in--and we also believe that some of the things that we had decided to store were, let's say, pilfered, although we would have to go through everything piece by piece to ascertain that.

Anyway, my wife warned me thst I should be prepared for what I was going to see, and as I turned the key in the lock, I was prepared for the worst.

Well, it wasn't as bad as I thought, but yes, it was pretty messy.

I went through a few boxes, and it was like I was meeting up with old friends I hadn't seen in years.

The first thing I saw were framed pictures of my sister and myself, probably from about 60 years ago.

I rediscovered numerous books, photos, and other things, and it is really heartbreaking that this stuff is stored away, just sitting there, and not being enjoyed.

When we moved, we threw out bags and bags and bags of different things, and, in fact, I was first hurt lugging a bag of junk down the stairs to the curb.

We spent about 15 minutes there, and I took three small things back to our apartment:

A book of Monkees cards--don't laugh, these are very valuable.

A scrapbook of articles I wrote for the old Island Ear publication and for other publications--the beginning of my professional writing career.

A book on The Little Rascals/Our Gang short features series, a book that is long out of print and very difficult to find.

I wish I could have brought home everything, but I was happy with what I was able to bring back with me.

With these three things in tow, we locked the door behind us and we left the building, having to use our code to drive out of the place.

It was a nice place to visit, but I do wish we had the room to bring all of it back with us.

But alas, that just wasn't meant to be.