Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

I hoard. Music, newspapers, ticket stubs, notebooks from school and even pieces of toys from ages ago. For entertainment value, for sentimental value and even sometimes just because I have somewhere to keep them, I keep them. It can't be a good thing and probably isn't, because it shows my propensity to lug the past around behind me.

I tend to forget things rather quickly. Possibly, I was dropped headfirst as a child, something my parents 'neglected to mention'. Maybe that's why I need physical reminders of events past, years gone by...and people. I've often saved emails and text messages to the point where inboxes were brimming full of, what to anyone else would seem a pointless waste of space. I saved them still, never knowing if the next one would be the last, (ok...not paranoia!) so I could read them later and go back to a time that was. Digital limitations eventually won a hard fought battle.
But to me, these have been the important things in my life. They're small things, simple things. Everything that I've saved, or tried to save, associated with a time, story or person I wanted to hold on to.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, now sans cover and a few pages, puts me at age four, when a beautiful teacher got a classful of fidgety kinderlings to pray for their classfellow, as I underwent surgery.
I open an old box of poster paints tucked away in my cupboard. Among the bottles of paint, a single foot broken off an action figure takes me back to every pre-birthday visit to the toyshop. G.I.Joe was the craze and I wanted them all. The simplicity of the time...a single figure was enough to keep me happy for months. Now, a CD, ten times the cost, can't hold my attention for more than a week.
A simple brown envelope, not yet too old, holds a heart bared open to me in an unsurpassable act of honesty and friendship, even though I let it down. It pains me, but I'll keep it still.

These days I don't have much faith in the future because I don't know how to build it yet. Time is slowly rolling over me like a cannonball. But if I have nothing else, I have reminders of a time when honey was sweeter than money; of people who made my day, everyday; and a lifetime steadily disassociating itself with this one.
"Don't live in the past." it goes; I'm not.
I just want to be able to remember what it was like, when it's time I don't even know what it is anymore.
Constant evolution, everybody's changing.
I'll never know who I'm gonna be tomorrow, but I always need to be reminded of who I was yesterday.


Although my music base has taken a major hit, with the loss of over two gigabytes of awesome singles spanning genres and generations, I do have a song for this week too.
Since it's the week and all, the first AIDS benefit song takes the place of pride.

Dionne Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Gladys Knight - That's What Friends Are For