The Things I Carried

My 2003 Chevy Cavelier is loaded to the brim. Tomorrow morning I will finally leave Ogden, perhaps never to return. Since there is only so much space in the car, decisions had to be made about what to bring. It is interesting to note what made it and what didn't. I should say that I leave behind a lot of furniture, including a bed, a roll away bed that doubled as couch, a couch and a lazy boy, a dresser, a television/dvd player. I shipped down two boxes of books but donated most of my books to the library. The trunk of my car is mostly filled with camping gear: two sleeping bags, a tent, a couple of large backpacks. The back seat mostly contains clothes, including a whole bag of winter gear I would use for outdoor sports and another bag containing mostly coats. There is also a box of miscellaneous camping gear sitting on the back seat. Stuffed back there as well is a comforter which for some reason I seem unwilling to part with, perhaps because it was originally a couple of hundred dollars and I got in on sale for fifty. The passenger side front seat is mostly filled with electronic gear including a laptop computer and a desk compute, a Bose radio, and a printer. Slid on top of that is a classical guitar. I have a lot of books covering the floor of the car and stuffed under the seats. I kept a painting that a friend gave me back in my graduate school days in Seattle. The snow shoes made it in but for obvious reasons the cross country skis did not. The last thing I had left was a box of all my lecture notes and one box containing all my academic materials including dossiers, tenure documents, etc. My original plan was to go up into the mountains and build a bonfire and burn them. But time got too short, so then I was just going to dump them. But it was too much material to load into a friend's dumpsters and store dumpsters were either locked or hard to get to. So I just drove to my university and left them outside of my old building.