Down in my basement, I have a HUGE folder of old instruction manuals that I store in my grandparents old trunk. I’d like to think that the trunk was one that my grandfather brought over from Greece circa 1917, but I can’t say for sure if that’s true. I feel like my parents told me that was the case, but I don’t remember. It looks that old and it’s charming. The inside is lined with what looks like early 20th century flowery wallpaper leftovers and the whole interior of the trunk smells like their house did.  I think a lot of people’s grandparents house smelt the same. You know the smell.

Anyway, I keep a lot of old stuff in there:

• Cassette tapes of me doing play-by-play on the radio for the CCHA/Kent State hockey games from 1991-1993.
• My Uncle Donnie’s 35mm film camera is in there. I never use it anymore, but I can’t bring myself to do anything with it, it’s the last remaining physical thing I have that was his so there is just no way I can part with it. For some strange reason, I associate that camera and its bag with my innocence. It is something that existed, that he held, used and enjoyed, before I could really comprehend tragedy. I wonder if any of my other family has anything physical of his? 25 years ago now.
• Old newspaper clippings of various events in my lifetime: articles about my high school hockey team, articles I wrote for the school newspaper at Kent State and major news events – Red Sox World Series, the crazy dude at Kent who was shooting random people, the tragedy at our high school at graduation, etc etc.
• Old school records, projects and pictures. I’ve posted some of these on Facebook and I still have more.
• Old instruction manuals for all my various electronics (TV, computer, appliances, etc, etc).

During this week I somehow, accidentally, locked our main floor thermostat. We have it on a timer, so it’s not a big deal as everything remained fairly normal, but now and then we override the set temperature if we’re too cold or too hot. So I needed to find out how to unlock the thermostat.  Are you totally sleeping yet? Yeah, I thought so. Anyway, the way this post is headed, you may be thinking that I ran downstairs to the trunk to fish out the thermostat manual. But I didn’t. Instead I went to the internet and in 10 seconds I had the manual open on my computer.

I have no idea why I am writing this. I’m a little sad that I went the soul-less route to save time instead of digging into the trunk, but I did save five minutes. Was it that important? In some sense, no. Part of me is regretting not going into the time capsule for it. However, it was 6am and I ended getting to spend the extra five minutes with my children. So that’s good. I’ll never get those minutes back, so I want to use them with my kids. Maybe when they’re in college I’ll dig up manuals in the trunk again.