I found an email I wrote two and a half years ago. I never
sent it. It went into a drafts folder where it’s sat dormant all this time. Hibernating.
Not dead, just impotent. I’ve allowed years’-worth of such emails to accrue, not
all drafts, but all hibernating. Now Google says my email is too full and the herd
must be thinned. Some emails were easy to resolve. Old notifications about Amazon
orders and email reminders about dental appointments went into the trash with barely
a sliver of thought to guide them there. Some of the others, though… What to
do with these real letters in electronic form? These other not-quite-dead
thoughts and feelings. Euthanasia, perhaps? Maybe I should help them silently slip into oblivion, some thoughts and feelings never properly expressed, others expressed and forgotten. David Sedaris tells a story where the vet tells
him he should think about euthanasia for his terminally ill cat. “Are you
thinking about it?” the vet asks. And as David pictures happy children in Japan,
he says, “Yes. Yes, I am.” And now I find I’m thinking about youth in Asia,
too. Girls with Hello Kitty backpacks, and boys with long, black emo bangs
particularly come to mind. Realizing my distraction I sigh. Youth in Asia won’t help me with my email
problem.
I briefly consider clicking the Select All box to indiscriminately
drop whole folders into the Trash…but not all of these words are trash. If some of these “electronic
mails” had been written with ink on paper they would be the kind I’d choose
to keep in a shoebox on the top shelf in my closet. I’d
revisit these words when I missed you too much, or when I wanted to remember a place name
or date of something we’d done together. I would say, “I think we went in
March…” and after looking through the stack of
letters I would find the one with the right postmark
to pull out and read. Better than paper letters, your reply includes my initial letter and
I hear our conversations all over again. As if in a time machine, I watch years
and months pass by, noting how your turn of phrase has changed, how my candor
has not. How do I decide which of your words or mine to throw away? Which
mattered least? Is it fair to say the mundane conversations about jam-making
and hike-taking matter less than complex theological discussions? or the other way 'round? Photos of
children, now mostly grown, and of birthdays long since past make me rub my forehead
and wonder out loud, "Has so much time really
passed?" Ancient notes from people I rarely think of now, sent from addresses
with no-longer extant domains, lead me wandering down an overgrown synaptic garden
path. Like Gandalf in the Mines of Moria I stare down the black passageway and say, "I have no memory of this place." Blithely, I hope they’re well and happy.
Ultimately, I can’t throw this box of letters away. I still care too
much about what you had to say, and I need my words to give your reply context.
But the boxes are too full, they won't fit on their internet shelf as is. As I
begin to despair of a reasonable solution my eye is drawn to an extended email
volley from last fall. It has multiple attachments, all of which are huge, the
result of a collaborative effort for a scientific presentation on seaweed species in the Gulf of Maine. Attached to this gangly email creature are several iterations of a PowerPoint presentation, a conference poster, and images of the species we were working with. Big. Fat. Files. I realize the final PowerPoint
is saved on my computer’s hard drive and a second copy is already archived on an external drive in my desk drawer. I see the RAM struggling in
the thicket, and recognize it for what it is. I delete the entire email volley, and thankfully empty the trash. Google gives me the sign; my sacrifice has
been accepted.
As I close my email, nostalgia charmingly vignetting days past,
I feel the same level of accomplishment as having cleaned the hall closet or weeded the back garden bed. I haven’t really solved my shoebox of letters dilemma, but I’m comforted to know I may never have to. A terabyte of Google shoe boxes can be had for only
$20 a year, you know.
