Blast from the past

7/13/10 Two dozen pieces of paper, recycled

A little piece of paper just baffled me.

It's a social security stub that should have been thrown out the same day it arrived in the mail. Apparently, about fifteen years ago I ordered a replacement social security card. When it arrived, it came with a little card that said, YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY CARD and detailed what the social security card is for. Of course, if I didn't already know what the card was for, I probably wouldn't have ordered a replacement one in the first place.

The only personalized information on this entire stub was my address, which is how I know when I received it. The address is the apartment I lived in my first two years out of college, 1994-1996.

Since then, I have moved seven times. And, somehow, this little scrap moved right along with me. All around Jersey, up to Maine, down to Harlem, back to Maine, and now all the way to Colorado. What's most fascinating to me is that the stub wasn't buried in the bottom of a file folder in the back of a file cabinet I never open. It was among the small, hand-picked vital documents that I transported personally across the country.

Clearly I didn't intentionally include it. In fact, I can't imagine that I ever would have purposely saved this thing. But somehow -- through a bizarre anti-downsizing force we must all constantly fight -- it survived every threat, and followed me for fifteen years.

Well, Mr. SS Information Card, your joyride ends tonight.

I emptied my briefcase of about two dozen scraps of paper and irrelevant documents, none as interesting as the above mentioned hanger-on, but all needing to go.

I'll be the first to admit that tonight's downsize is a tad lame. In my defense, I had a more significant and perhaps more interesting downsize lined up, but it failed to come together at the last moment. Subsequently, I had to scramble, and my options were limited at 9:30 in the evening.

But, I think my discovery reinforces the necessity of frequently culling our files, tossing out the little scraps of paper than collect in the corners of our lives. Perhaps they even distract us from the beauty of life, which is more than enough reason to take a few minutes to downsize them.

Beside, you never know what you may find.