I’ve collected a lot of files over the years, gigabytes of them. Over the years they have been backed up a number of times. Old of the collections that gets backed up a lot are emails. The email software I preferred was Eudora because it would open a window for each mailbox an email was filtered and sent to. This was a great way to manage the 100’s of emails I got each day and keep the conversations threaded. Unfortunately Eudora stopped being supported about 10 years ago so. So I switched reluctantly to Outlook.
The problem was I had massive collections of emails from the past I couldn’t access. Thankfully, I found some software, Eudora to Outlook Transfer, that will recover them. I spent an evening converting as much of those collections as I could. At the same time, it was a trip down memory lane looking at the many mailboxes I kept for specific purposes.
Given the emotions this brought up, I thought it would be a good poetry prompt. Have a look:
Old Emails
Thousands of emails
Collected in hundreds of folders
Archived by Eudora over twenty plus years
Sorted by
chat groups, work projects, family,
committees, interests, resources,
humor, junk and spam,
some infected with ancient viruses.
Why retain this detritus?
Long forgotten quips, snippets, verbal fragments,
old news and gossip, requests, appreciations,
echoes of people long gone and mostly forgotten,
biographical discarded virtual scrap paper.
My wife, Philomena
Puzzles over my obsession with the past.
Why search for dead ancestors
in Princess Anne, Maryland graveyards?
Our son, Andrew
Has no interest in
carefully curated videos of
the first years of his life.
Maybe I’m just a nostalgia addict.
The feeling
Of holding the 12 bit analog to digital converter circuit board
I repaired in the 1970’s for use with the HP 2100 computer.
or the NorthStar Computers NorthNet network circuit board
I wrote diagnostic code to validate in the 1980’s.
Of looking at the beautiful drawings and handwriting
of a previous lover who wouldn’t marry me
or at an old scanned picture of my best man Geoff
still full of youth and vitality
now long dead.
Of listening to digitized recordings of cassette tapes
music singing praises to Allah/God/Spirit/Life
that still moves my heart.
There is spiritually uplifting value and meaning
Hidden between
the Subject: and the Body:
being sent To: and From:
As a newly retired guy
with a limited time horizon
Maybe now there is time to find it.