What It All Comes Down to

And what it all comes down to
Is that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine
'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket
And the other one is givin' a high five

—Alanis Morissette

I remember when I was kid that someone did an estimate of what the human body was worth if you tried to sell its parts as chemical elements and compounds. The answer was “not much.” Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen are not that rare. Even today, I discovered via Google that the human body’s value, element-wise, is only around $600 with inflation. What it all comes down to is that we are still not worth very much.

But this is foolish reasoning for someone who spent many years of schooling making himself more valuable and then many more years accumulating both valuable wisdom and … stuff. I have a lot of stuff. An inordinate percentage of my stuff is made of paper—both bound paper in the form of books and notebooks and loose or stapled paper stored inside folders and stuffed into file cabinets. I am clearly not part of the “paperless society.”

Being sheltered in place for the time being, I decided to evaluate and even eliminate some of my paper stuff. I found some “treasures” — the wonderful/terrible poems I wrote in high school and college, lesson plans and tests from my teaching days, datebooks from my office days, draft manuscripts from my writing days, and reams of financial records. I discovered tax returns and investment records dating back to 1973, when Audrey and I got married. Our first tax returns were actually filled out in pencil and ink. Carbon paper was also involved, which just proves how old we are. Later forms were done on computers, of course, but copies were still printed out on paper even for those filed online. And I kept them all. Until last week.

I had two reasons behind my hoarding. First, I was told that you should always have your back records available if the IRS should (shudder) come calling for them. We all fear IRS auditors, but I decided that even they would have no interest in how much I earned or what I paid or didn’t pay in taxes in 1978 or even 2008. So much stuff. What does it all come down to?

Reason number 2 was fear that, if I threw out some of my papers, someone nefarious might somehow (while sifting through deep piles of garbage in a dump somewhere) come across a page containing my social security number and use it in a nefarious way against my interests. Is that a paranoid thought? Maybe, but what if….

So I un-foldered or un-enveloped years of financial records and packed them into four garbage bags. My plan was to take the bags to the nearby community college, where each spring the county sponsors a free shredding day. But the coronavirus foiled those plans. The community college is not open, and the shredding day was cancelled. I did see an electronic sign recently that announced “Spring Shredding Day, October 26,” but I’m not that confident.  

Luckily, I have a small shredder at home, and I spent 8-10 hours putting papers from two of the bags, a few at a time, through the shredder. The machine objected occasionally and declared itself overheated and overworked. But after a brief rest, it was ready to go again.

My shredder's green light would glow red
when it needed a break.

Now my two large bags of pages were reduced to four large containers of shredded bits. Every two weeks, a town sanitation truck comes around the neighborhood collecting recyclable paper. I was ready for it this week. I lugged a large garbage can and three other containers filled with shredded paper to the curb. 

What all that paper comes down to

How much do more than 40 years of tax returns weigh? Ask my aching back. To add insult to injury, I watched the sanitation guys dump the shredded paper into their truck like it was weightless. I wanted to yell, “Hey, when those papers were younger, I was stronger too.” But I didn’t. I simply took a picture of the empty cans and began planning how to get rid of the remaining bags of paper stuffed in the garage. Maybe in two weeks … or four weeks…

Where did all the paper and all the years go?

What does it all come down to? Your body is just a set of inexpensive chemicals, and the records of your life that you have been hoarding for so long can be reduced by a small, finicky machine to tiny shreds of paper and hauled away by strong young men. It’s all pretty humbling.