Savage Words: It’s time to purge some things, but not everything

I’ve said it before in this particular column, but I don’t throw anything away.

Maybe I should start.

I have literally saved everything over the course of my sports writing career, which took me to the NBA, WNBA, NFL and IndyCar.

I’ve got a lot of memorabilia from those days. But I also have a lot of everything else…and I mean everything. I’ve saved every thank-you note, every card, every drawing a little kid drew for me, everything. I’ve got bins and bins of stuff from my career in sports in a storage unit on the west side of Sioux Falls.

But it’s not just the sports things that I’ve saved. Every…single…note, card, book, magazine, message, ever sent to me. I’ve got them all.

I’ve been saving all of these things in that west side storage unit for years.

Eight years, actually.

At $114 per month, that’s about $11,000 I’ve spent on dusty boxes, totes, furniture, bed frames, books, framed photos, kitchen utensils, pots, pans, old clothes, desks, dog kennels…and an artificial Christmas tree.

Over the eight years of having that storage unit, we’ve used the artificial tree only once. It’s been an expensive plastic tree.

For some things, obviously, it’s time to go. For 30-plus years, we’ve been saving things for a lake cabin we had hoped to buy someday. So, for 30-plus years, and the last eight in my storage unit, I’ve been hanging on to some $20 pots and pans, $15 blankets, and countless trinkets and treasures to make a lake cabin complete.

But $11,000 for a bunch of dusty old things? I think it’s time to pitch some of that old stuff, and if we should happen to buy a lake cabin someday, we’ll buy new pots, pans, blankets and trinkets.

I went out to the storage unit on Sunday just to get an inventory of what’s still in there, and to see what’s been my return on an $11,000 investment. It didn’t feel great, looking over all of that stuff that has slowly been gathering dust for nearly a decade. It also didn’t feel great because as I stood there and looked, the wind chill had temps at minus-3 degrees.

Obviously, there were some sentimental things that caught my eye, the same eye that was draining because of the sub-zero wind that was whipping up a frenzy.

I saw my daughter’s crib, which later transformed into her bed as a child. When we got her a new bed in middle school, we saved the old one, which I took to the storage unit for the first time about six years ago. When I did, I put all the nuts and bolts to reassemble the bed into a plastic bag, and taped it to one of the bed posts. In that bag, I wrote a note for the next person to see it, assuming it would be my daughter’s husband, who would be assembling their newborn’s crib.

I remember writing that note six years ago. It’s essentially a message to my future son-in-law, telling him about his wife, my daughter, as a 15-year-old and that she was a good kid. 

I saw that plastic bag on Sunday, flapping in the chilly wind as I stood there and took a few trips down memory lane.

So needless to say, I’m going to get rid of some things and hopefully eliminate that storage unit in 2026. But some things, like that bed frame and plastic bag taped to one of its legs, are going to find a place somewhere that I can still keep an eye on.

But the Christmas tree? That baby won’t see the end of January.