Memories (Can you hear Barbra singing?)

Mary Sheehan Theisen. Watched Chicago burn.

I'm cleaning out the office closet, and I started going through one little filing cabinet that has three drawers. One drawer was where I kept old receipts for past income taxes. I threw that all away. If they want to come after me, fine. Can't get blood from a stone. The second drawer is taking much longer. In that drawer I kept old correspondence. Letters from family and friends, things my mom would send me every week. This is going back thirty years while I lived in Florida. I kept every letter and card that was sent to me, with a noticeable drop off around the time email became popular. I have thrown about ninety five percent of that stuff away. I haven't looked at it in the years since it was mailed to me, and I know that when I die it will all be tossed into a giant dumpster that the family will have out front. That's what happens to all that stuff you hang on to, the dumpster. Because nobody cares about it but you. One thing I have kept is the letter my mom sent me after visiting in 2002, two years after my dad died. I know she was still grieving, but she took the time to take photographs of Mark and me, and mail copies to me. That's what I am going to keep, the few letters that contain vital information about our family. Letters written not that long ago, but before Mom's memory started getting a little sketchy. There is one short note where Mom tells me about her grandmother, my great grandmother, and how she was twelve years old when the Great Chicago fire happened. I sure would have loved to ask Mary Sheehan about that. So that's what I'm doing this weekend. I'm looking at the rest of this crap in the filing cabinet and the crap still in my closet. I just wonder why the hell did I pay movers six thousand dollars to schlep it all the way up from Florida? Seeing as how in the three years I have lived here I haven't looked at or used one thing in that closet.