For two days, I felt this continuous vibration. I'm deaf so I couldn't hear anything but the house was vibrating as if we were living in a trailer on a major earthquake fault line. Finally I went upstairs to
investigate. My wife was in her office shredding everything in sight. She had bought a heavy duty shredder and was systematically eliminating every evidence that we existed.
She claimed she was protecting us from identify theft. But I tried to tell her if she shredded everything, we wouldn't know who we were. She said in a couple of years we wouldn't know anyway and she wasn't so sure that I even knew now.
But I hated to see all the stuff shredded...she was loving the whirring sound of the shredder and she
was stuffing things into it. She was mesmerized.
"Is that our marriage license you have there?" I asked.
She said, "Sure. We don't need it. We've been married more than 50 years and nobody has ever asked to see it."
I said, "Your Father did."
"He was a very suspicious man," she said, "And the license is written in German. Nobody can
read it except Germans. We might have registered to vote over there."
I tried to tell her that she might have to show the marriage license in order go get any of my goodies when I die. But she said she planned to shred any of my goodies that would fit in the
shredder. The woman has gone crazy!
She did the same thing last year with dozens of photo albums. she ripped out pictures of our
daughters and gave them to each of the girls. The rest she was going to throw out. Fortunately I was able to get them away from her. I know that in a few years I probably won't be able to remember who the people are (there are some now that I don't recognize!) but the photos are hard evidence that we had a life...and in all the pictures, we were smiling so it looks like a good
life.
She says people always smile when they see a camera and it doesn't mean we were having a good time just because we were smiling. I suppose she's right. A camera does sort of say, "Cheese". Although prisoners don't smile when they get their pictures taken. And my Grandmother never smiled.
I love the photo albums and I now have them hidden from The Grim Reaper. I look at them and it's like a stroll down memory lane.
I also have a drawer full of pictures that people have sent me at Christmas time...mainly photos of their kids at various ages. I never throw any of them away. I may need to lock them up now that the shredder is in the house. I think it will be a good mental exercise when I am old and in a nursing home, trying to figure out who's who. I have a Chinese friend and I can always recognize her daughter, Gloria. And I have pictures of her from age one until she just got ready to go to Harvard.
They sell a lot of shredders at Staples so my wife probably isn't the only one that's into shredding. My wife shreds all of our junk mail. She doesn't want anyone to know we buy
our clothes from Haband.
I caught her shredding a box of old love letters that I sent her years ago when I was a lonely G.I.
over in Germany. I couldn't believe my words were being ripped apart.
"You're shredding my love letters?" I asked.
"I've already read them," she answered.
"I know, but you saved them for more than 50 years, so why are you shredding them now,"
I demanded to know.
"I didn't have a shredder before," she said with a shrug.
I should have written them on unshreddable paper.
"Why don't you just burn them? That would be more romantic."
"Bad for the environment. Pollution, you know,."
I was beginning to take this personally. "I didn't shred your love letters," I told her.
"You probably threw them away," she said.
"No. No. I recycled them. I gave them to other G.I.'s who never got any mail of their own.
"I'm surprised that none of them ever wrote to you," I added.
I guess I should be more concerned about identity theft but the world has given me so many other things to be fearful about. I'm afraid I'll start shaking like the shredder. I'm not really afraid of anything and I don't want to start.
"I'm coming in your room next," my wife yells, "and I'm shredding all of those old newspaper
clippings you have from junior high."
"Those are MY clippings," I yelled back. "They were the first things that I wrote for publication and you might need them if someone wants to write my life story later."
"You were the editor of the junior high newspaper," she said. "And that's the only reason they
got published."
She's right about that. But what's the point of being editor if you can't publish your own stuff?
