Packing my library

Well, I have not posted in a while because I am getting ready to move to Seattle. As much as I am looking forward to the change, there is a lot that I am going to be leaving behind. Not only will I miss Pittsburgh, but I will not be able to take everything that I own with me and that means losing a good part of my collection of systems and software. I am in the process of sorting it all and placing what I decide to part with on eBay or Craigslist. It is amazingly difficult and every time I start, I quit and do something else to avoid making decisions. Part of the problem is that I am a pack rat. I know this and I think that most people who collect things are. However, these systems played an important role in my childhood, both as toys and teachers, but also as unattainable desires that we could never afford. Getting rid of these things just as I leave the city where I was born and raised makes this break with the past even more salient. Tonight I think I will start with some of the newer items (like my original xBox). If I can get momentum going, maybe I can finish.

It is strange though, because I may be leaving a place, but the past it represents is no longer there. The other day I drove out to Wexford, a northern suburb, to the site where there used to be a David Weiss. If you did not have one in your area, it was kind of like a Service Merchandise. Anyway, back when my family had little money, we would go to stores like David Weiss and my brother and I would play with the Atari 2600 or the computers that were on display. In so many ways, I wish that I could go back to some of these places and see them just one more time, but then I am ultimately disappointed... it is not the place that I really want to visit, but the time.

A few weeks ago, my partner and I took a drive down to Uniontown to visit Ohiopyle State Park. Along the way there is a discount store that my father would take us to called Peachins. It was another place where my brother and I would stare longingly at the 2600 cartridges that my mother invariably called "Atari tapes". I saw the sign for it along the side of the road and immediately tried to visit it, only to find that the original part of the complex had burnt to ground just days earlier.

Hill's, Zayre, Dahlkemper's and so many other places where I spent so much time as a kid... spending time in air conditioning, playing with toys that someone else would own someday... are all gone now. Sometimes, not even the buildings remain. And for as suburban and embarrassingly commercial as it all was, it was my childhood, and I miss it.

So, tonight I will go home and start unpacking the boxes that house my collection, deciding what will go with me and what will stay behind. Just like the places of my past, I know that the times I associate with them are forever gone and through forgetting and recreating them, they grow ever more idyllic.