PUTTING IT OFF

I’ve been putting off saying goodbye to them for quite a while. Actually, it’s probably more like eight or ten years.

Some would call that ‘procrastination’. I prefer to think of it as showing respect for old friends.

My wife has been urging me to dump them for a very long time. But I resisted. I would say, “You just never know when you may need to call on an old friend to help you out of a jam or do you a favour.”

After hearing that line or a variation of it so many times, she would just snort and walk away. In her heart, she knew that it was a waste of time asking me to cut them loose. I knew I had to do it but I always had good reasons for putting it off. 

Quite a few of them have been with me for over forty years and served me well many times. The newer ones have been part of my life for maybe fifteen or twenty years. A few others are even more recent than that.

The other morning, I woke up knowing that the time had finally come to suck it up and show them all the door. Oddly, I didn’t feel any guilt or remorse. Just the resigned calmness that comes with knowing that saying goodbye is long overdue and now is the time.

When faced with the prospect of a difficult event or day, I often delay it all by going to my local coffee shop and getting a large steeped tea, three cream. That morning, I made it four cream. I was tempted to add in a cherry cheese Danish. But under the circumstances, a pastry at half past six in the morning just didn’t seem to be the right thing to do.

When I got back home, I sat in my car sipping tea, figuring out just how I would do it.

With many of them, parting should be pretty straight forward. But there were others, I didn’t know how many exactly, which would be much harder to dump. ‘Dump’. It was a verb my wife was quite fond of using whenever it came to my friends. But there were many who would require a special approach.

On my cell, I called a trusted friend for his advice about how to do it with as little pain to me and them as possible. His advice was “Do it quick. Do it clean. And most important of all, don’t overthink it.”

I went directly to my garage and set everything up. I would bring each one here and do what had to be done. When everything was ready, I went back into the house, down the stairs to the basement and into the room where they all had been patiently waiting.

It was time.

There must have been at least twenty of them. Like with all good friends, you never really ever count them so coldly. You just know that you have many friends and over the years they have been there for you when you really needed them.

I walked over to where they were all huddled against the wall. I’m sure they knew what was coming. But they didn’t move. They didn’t cry out. They didn’t beg me to leave them be for another year or so. Reaching out and touching the one nearest me, I felt an immediate pang of regret mixed with sadness.

And then I began saying goodbye. 

It took me the better part of two days to bring each one quietly out of the basement to the spot I had prepared in the garage. I even kept the large garage door closed while saying goodbye. It just seemed the respectful thing to do.

Twenty-two banker boxes crammed full of books from my years as a social worker. Almost every book held a special memory. Often I would take one from its box and look through it, recalling how its knowledge had helped me in my work or provided an insight that guided me to a solution for a troubling problem.

Had you been with me in the garage, you would not have heard me utter one word in the two days it took to say my goodbyes, whisper my appreciations. As I held a special book in my hands, I found myself having a silent conversation. Sometimes I would open it to a yellow or pink post-it note on a page that in earlier times had special importance. Memories flooded back unbidden. Clients, colleagues, good times and bad, laughter and tears, huge stress and periods of creative energy, all of it washed over me.

My friend had told me that hardcover books could not be recycled unless the covers and glued binding were removed. “It’s a very difficult, physically challenging job” he had cautioned. But in an inspired flash, I figured out a way to do it quickly with minimum fuss. I will spare you all the details save to say that it involved introducing each hardcover book to the hungry teeth of a chop saw blade.

Finally, the contents of the last box had been emptied and readied for the paper recycling bins at the local landfill. My van was filled with boxes and other assorted containers holding the remains of my professional library. I drove to the landfill in silence. On the way, I stopped to get another tea. It would be the final toast to my hundreds of books that had once been such good and loyal companions.

I filled two large recycling bins almost to overflowing. Quite unexpectedly, I felt sad - a deep, lingering sadness. When the last page fluttered into the bin, I stood for quite a while quietly sipping my tea. My thoughts wandered wherever they wished to go.

Staring at the large mounds of ripped, cut and shredded pages, I realized why I had put off saying goodbye for so very long.

My books were so much a part of who I was, who I am now.

Here at the city dump, I was leaving a large part of my professional identity in two battered, blue recycling bins.

I officially retired from active teaching and consulting a few years ago. But untiI the moment that I finally said goodbye emotionally at the landfill, I was not fully retired. 

Several days later, as I write, there is a big, hollowed-out space inside of me.

But here’s what I’ve learned from the experience.

No one ever tells a retiree what to expect when they say goodbye to part of their life at the community landfill.

But I have just shared it with you. And that’s a comforting thing.

First Publication: The story appears in Basil O'Flaherty on March 11, 2016. The above version has been slightly edited from the original published version.

The Backstory: After many years of 'retirement', I finally decided it was time to get rid of all my professional library. I had procrastinated for years and years. But I did it. This is my story. Of all the stories that I have published, this one has generated the most emotional discussion and sharing of similar personal experiences with one's own artifacts from work or, and this is most frequent, the adult kids cleaning out the parents' house after their deaths.

Legal Rights. ‘Putting It Off’ is the intellectual property of the author, Don Herald. No part of this story may be reproduced in any format without the written permission of the author.