This has been such a long year that I have to think hard to remember how it started -- with the gradual elimination of my possessions from a flat in the Mission District of SF, where I'd lived for 17 years. There is no other place where I lived much more than half that many years, and it was my last address in the city over a total of 49 years.
In that sense, and that sense only, you could call me a San Francisco 49er.
Most of what we discarded was paper -- files, news clips, books, drawings, documents, maps -- from the previous century.
But other discards were of more recent lineage -- laptops, cellphones, and a tablet. We tend to cycle through these digital devices so fast that our lives end up being catalogued like so many software development iterations.
There's mylife 1.0, mylife 2.0, and so on.
Only the most fastidiously detail-oriented consumer manages to transfer all of his documents and photos from one device to the next. There are cost issues, storage issues, timing issues. In the process, it's all too easy to just let the record of a particular stage in your life slip away, byte by byte, into the digital dumping grounds.
Recently, as a gaggle of my grandchildren were exuberantly playing a video game on six separate devices, one of my granddaughters brought an old cellphone over to me and asked for my Apple ID in order to unlock it.
It turns out it was one of my old castoffs. Improbably, I recalled the password and suddenly I was transported back a number of years to a time when everyone was younger than today -- my 20-somethings were teens, my grandkids were toddlers, I was fresh into a new job.
There were photos of events I'd long since forgotten.
My work emails had been preserved, too, and were a reminder of how I had advocated for the staffers reporting to me, discovering overlooked pay disparities and vacation accruals that benefited them. One of my tendencies as a manager was to cut through corporate red tape and seek ways to make their jobs more user-friendly.
Looking through this data, I realized that we really should hold on to those outmoded digital devices or at least their contents. Even if all you preserve is piecemeal, it can become part of a mosaic that reflects aspects of your history that might otherwise be lost.
My main point is to value your life, value your past, guard your present, preserve as much of the record as you can for future purposes.
Somebody out there in the future is sure to be grateful. It might even be you.
***
* A U.S. District Court judge Saturday dismissed a lawsuit by the Trump campaign trying to invalidate millions of Pennsylvania mail-in votes in a significant loss for the campaign. Though the case was always extremely unlikely to succeed, Trump's backers and legal team -- and particularly his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani -- had pinned their hopes on the federal judge in Pennsylvania giving some credibility to their suspicions of fraud and entertaining Trump's attempt to overturn the popular vote for President-elect Joe Biden. But Judge Matthew Brann, a longtime and well-known Republican in Pennsylvania, refused. (CNN)
* Business and World Leaders Move On as Trump Fights to Reverse Election -- President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is seizing the moment, not to aggressively confront the president he defeated, but to act presidential in his stead. (NYT)
* Anger builds in Black community over Trump’s unsupported claims of voter fraud in big cities (WashPo)
* The National Guard has been deployed to El Paso to provide support with the morgue crisis. (CNN)
* Saudi Arabia’s leaders counted on President Trump’s unwavering support, but President-elect Biden has vowed to take away the kingdom’s “dangerous blank check.” (NYT)
* Trump’s Legal Team Sets a Precedent for Lowering the Bar -- President Trump and his lawyers are engaged in a spectacle that would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous, and if the stakes weren’t so high. (NYT)
* Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo and the perils of pandemic stardom (WashPo)
* A Push Emerges for the First Native American Interior Secretary -- An expanding coalition of Native Americans, liberal activists and Democrats in Congress are demanding an American Indian Interior secretary, and they want Deb Haaland. (NYT)
* Professional Bowler Falls Into Existential Crisis After Realizing There No Way To Know How Deep Finger Holes Go (The Onion)
***
And to think the only sports team I played for in high school was the bowling team. I was terrible.
I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden
Along with the sunshine
There's gotta be a little rain some time
-- Joe South
-30-
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