Final Goodbyes

Saturday, 25 March 2023

We're edging closer to the final goodbye for St Canice Avenue. Last weekend I spent a day sorting out what felt like billions of filing cabinets filled with papers of various importance (from not-at-all to I-seriously-can't-believe-you-kept-this) in dad's office.

To start with every surface and wall looked like this:

I filled a recycling bag about every 10 minutes then had to carry it down the steep and tight spiral staircase (without the luxury of being able to see my feet due to the bag in my hands). I did attempt dropping the bags from the top but that just resulted in annual reports from 1978 exploding into the area below.   This is recycling area after just a few hours - it just about doubled in size before I was done:

Along the way I was able to assemble an interesting antiquities shelf featuring a handwritten bank book, a real plane ticket, the ikea catalog from 1978, an original letter dymo thing and lots of other stuff the kids would have never seen or used.  I've been trying to explain Letraset for Zali for years so it was good to find a few examples of that amongst it all as well.

After my efforts the office looked a lot better:

and I was also able to assemble a free stationary store downstairs in the kitchen - it had a large stock of staples and drawing pins - funny we don't seem to use drawing pins anymore!

I was as careful as I could be (within reason) to not throw out any photos or letters or general family memorabilia, it was mostly just old financial papers, miscellaneous documents, annual reports, statements and warranties for items long since disposed of.   I saved things like slides, photos, some family history documents and artwork from us children.

With my antiquities assembled and the stationary shop fully stocked the next obvious step was to lure the children over with the promise of free pizza and stationary, then subject them to a slide night with a selection of slides I'd found.  As it turned out I didn't have to worry about their reluctance as they didn't really have an idea of what a 'slide-night' was, so like animals which have never been harmed by humans, they hadn't learnt to have a fear of it.

So with mum and dad, me, Jon, Paul, Denny, and a few grandchildren we had a fun evening fossicking through our old school reports and fathers days cards and droning to the kids about how bank books and cheques worked (they didn't get it).  I'd pre-sorted through the slides so we didn't have too many to look at but the ones I'd chosen were pretty good - that's Denny, Paul then me from left to right:

I should say that despite the kids not really understanding how cheque books or hand written bank books could possibly work, Zali and Jamie did figure out the slide projector and kicked me off it almost immediately due to my consistent inability to put a slide in the right way around the first time. Between them it was a very smooth show after that (much to everyone else's relief). Once the show was over the kids scurried off to the bedroom to see if they could find any valuable stamps in dad's large collection of first edition releases:

but unfortunately, much like dad's heavy investment in 1980 Moscow Olympic coins, they hadn't appreciated much past face value.  

Overall it was a great night, and another step along the way to a new era for St Canice.