CARLTON FLETCHER: Sifting through boxes full of memories

Tonight, I’m cleaning out my closet.

— Eminem

But if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.

— Rick Nelson

The boxes had sat in the garage for the past couple of weeks, untouched since I’d moved them there. Before that, they’d collected dust in a storage room for the past several years, forgotten since this newspaper moved from its Pine Avenue offices to cozier digs on West Broad.

Sure, part of the reason the boxes sat in my garage untouched for an extended period was my laziness. For some reason I can’t quite comprehend, I’ve found I don’t function that well in heat indices that surpass 100 degrees.

But finally, with a garage sale pending, I braved the heat and collected the boxes in a heaping pile. I rolled the green garbage bin up to the box pile and started in.

There was a little bit of everything in the boxes, from the sublime to the ridiculous. The fact that all I ended up keeping from those dozen or so boxes was a pile that I could easily carry inside in one load is an indicator that the ridiculous outnumbered the sublime by a wide margin.

When I finished, the garbage container was full … and I was left conflicted.

The stuff that I browsed was stuff that at one time had been important to me, on a personal level and in the context that it helped me do my job. There were inches-thick volumes of rulings by FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) concerning the pipeline that ran through a large swath of southwest Georgia (remember that?); files filled with materials on local, regional and national bands I’d interviewed over the years; the boxes that my Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute bobbleheads came in; stacks of CDs — some favorites I’d lost track of over the years, song mixes created for me by a girl I like a whole lot (she’s my wife) and others sent to me by said local, regional and national bands in hopes that I’d mention them … ah, those were the days — piles of notes from stories that I considered important to the region; copies of old articles, some I remembered vividly, others I’d all but forgotten.

That’s the stuff — other than some of the CDs — that filled the green trash container.

But there also were items that touched me in those places that transcend a specific time or place, things that I piled up in the “keep” file. First were the stacks of plaques I’d received for my writing over the years of this career, plaques that now don’t seem so important but then were reminders that some of the things I’d written had resonated with others who judge such things.

There were a few copies of papers (they were so much wider then!) with stories that I placed in the keeper file: One about the growth of the adult “toy” industry that had suddenly blossomed in the city, another about the history of the Albany Civic Center, my overarching — and time-consuming — list of my 500 favorite songs and a follow-up list of 500 songs that I’d inadvertently left out of the first 500, and my favorite: a column about my daughter Jordan’s first game as a Westover cheerleader. (Hard to believe that beautiful young teenager in the accompanying photo is now a mommy of two!)

There was a laminated copy someone had sent me of the first column I wrote for The Herald, files with notes used to compile my top songs list and with data on the Civic Center, and a favorite hand-written letter delivered on 9-5-08 from someone who signed it “Hog Nut Big Joe” that wished me and all Democrats to burn in hell — among other unprintable tidbits.

No, I didn’t keep most of this miscellany that I’d collected over the years, but each little item evoked memories of a career that’s had more than its share of ups and downs. And it’s those life-defining memories — and others I’ll collect until they wheel me out of here — that make this maybe the greatest job in the world.