I’m moving.It turns out that transport companies don’t offer service to Enceladus, and inter-planetary moves are expensive, so we’re moving just one state over.If, by chance, you know me from work you need not worry—my job will remain the same but the commute will become tele.Over the past several weeks my wife and I have been sorting through the accumulated effects of thirty years of married life.Our current apartment has an attic.Uninsulated, there are few days when it’s not too hot or too cold to stand to be up there for very long—kind of like other planets, come to think of it.Also neighbors don’t appreciate creaking floorboards over their heads the hours I’m awake.Going through things that were hurriedly packed to get out of Nashotah House was quite poignant.That’s the way fragments of past lives are, I guess.You see, that was an unexpected move.Life has a way of being complicated.
One of the more remarkable discoveries was how much we used to put on paper.As a scholar of ancient documents, I have an inherent distrust of electronic media.To be written means to appear on a permanent—as much as material things can be permanent—medium.Back in my teaching days assignments were handed in on paper.Grading was done on paper.Teaching evaluations were distributed on paper.Academic publications were done on paper.In order to be a professor you needed a house.I taught at five different schools over a span of nearly two decades.There was a lot of paper to go through.
The academic mindset is seasonal.I kept waiting for summer to come to have time to sort through everything.Outside academia, I’m still learning, summer is just another series of work days.Yes, you can cash in vacation time, but you’ll not have that entirely sensible canicule hiatus that allows you to examine what you’ve accumulated and determine if you’ll ever need it again.It was like archeology in the attic.When volunteering at Tel Dor in the summer of 1987—summers were like that, as I said—I learned that by far the majority of pottery found at digs is discarded.There are literally tons of it thrown away.You can’t keep it all.So the attic was a kind of triage of memories.Not all of this was going to fit in the new house.Decisions had to be made.I guess I was thinking that if a company could take us to Enceladus they’d have figured out how to transport everything.It turns out that to escape earth’s gravity, you have to get your ship as light as possible.With over half a century of memories, however, there’s bound to be some weight to be left behind.