Burning History

Smoke gets in your eyes when you're burning history, papers you've kept for a long time.  This week I fired up my big kiva in the back yard and started burning boxes of stuff that's been stored in my little house out back for a long time.  God only knows  how many moves those papers have made over the years because some of them were fifty years old.  But they're up in smoke now, gone, and so is a little bit of me.  A lot of me was in those papers, some of them left over from college and graduate school . . . and some from my 35 years of teaching college courses.  I watched them burn with mixed emotions, but I'm just doing what someone would've done in a few years when I'm gone. 

I don't know why I saved all that stuff long after I had no need for it, but I've got a feeling it was because they may well have saved me.  To say that I struggled as a teenager and even through my twenties would be an understatement.  My parents agonized over what would become of me.  At twenty, I was going nowhere - had barely graduated from high school, showed no inclination that I'd amount to much.  Restlessness was my worse enemy, my demon, that thing that drove me to do some self-destructive things.  I loved fast cars, even faster women, and booze.  A car accident when I was 21 almost took me out, left me with injuries I'd never fully recover from.  What do you do with a kid like that?  Well, you make a college professor out of him.

My parents and a select few other people refused to give up on me.  I managed to get a couple of years of college behind me, then quit for a while to work are several jobs.  Back in college finally, I did much better and that's because I finally learned how to study.  I fell in love with history and political science, ended up getting a college degree and a M.A., finished my residency and course work on a Ph.d., and then went to work as a college professor.  I stuck with that occupation for almost 35 years, but I didn't calm down until my forties.  I stopped drinking, went through a divorce, and remarried during the decade of my forties.  Looking back, I'm a slow learner about some things, but life as an academician saved me.  I'm still using my education in retirement, perhaps more now than ever before.  Books have been my life, and now I'm writing them.

But I burned a lot of information over the past few days - lecture notes, research material, class lecture notes, and other stuff that allowed me to get the education I needed.  I don't need them now, but I sure needed what they gave me.  They served a purpose, and they were little more than remembrances of where I've been and how I got where I am now.  Stored safely here in my files are other papers I'll never burn.  I don't need the warmth of a fire that much, and sometimes it's good to keep around enough things to remind you that history is important . . . especially when it's your history.