When I got to the radio station this morning, there was a stern email awaiting me which had been sent to general manager Dave Cole- someone in the administration asked him to ask me to please delete some of my Gateway emails because my inbox was completely full – – – and that made it impossible both for me to receive any new emails and for me to receive voice mail. (They’re part of the same system.) I am terrible about reading my GTC email because so much of what comes there will be emails from Wanda Whipple thanking everyone for the get well cards while she was having her varicose vein surgery. . . or from Charlie Chalktray reminding everyone that the welding seminar on the Elk Horn campus has been postponed until April. It makes it very tempting to just ignore that account altogether, except that I do occasionally receive important emails there that have to do with the radio station. But lately it has been all but impossible for me to access the account on my own computer, which made it even more tempting to let the mail pile up. So today, it was time to sit down with my delete button and dispose of just over 1000 emails. I think this might be called the cyber equivalent of being Ruthless with one’s Discards. I only hope that in that plethora of messages that I dumped without reading, there wasn’t a job offer from National Public Radio or the Metropolitan Opera.
Believe it or not, this mountain of email in my Gateway account is a mole hill compared to what I’ve allowed to pile up in my Carthage and Yahoo accounts. Let’s begin with Carthage, which is the account I use the most and probably keep in best shape. As of tonight, my inbox contains 7,402 messages. . . 1,834 of which are unread. For all I know, there’s offers of tenure, pay raises and deals to publish my music that I just haven’t gotten around to reading yet; apparently I’m waiting for the day when I sprain my ankle on the treadmill at Razor Sharp and am stuck in bed for three days with nothing to do except catch up on emails.
And yet, that mountain of email pales beside what is in the longest-lived of my email accounts. . . Yahoo . . . which as of right now holds 12, 421 messages – 8,332 of which are unread. (Why do I get the feeling that I’m going to be a guest on Oprah one of these days, sitting between an odd woman with bad teeth and 579 cats in her house and a guy with bad breath who house is filled to the ceiling with every edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette since 1944?) Those are numbers of which I am not proud – but somehow, given what the rest of my life is like, they are not all that astonishing.
Strangely enough, the oldest message in the inbox used to be an email which Kathy sent me on September 11th, 2001 – in the middle of that awful day – which was a much harder day for her than it was for me because the staff at Schulte Elementary School had been instructed not to tell any of the students about what had occurred. . . so here are these teachers trying to carry on as though nothing is wrong, but acutely aware that something in fact is horribly wrong. She sent me such a sweet email at one point, just saying that she loved me and could barely wait until we could see each other and hug. For some reason, that email isn’t there anymore- the oldest one is from about a month later- but when it was there, I would return to it every so often and read it just to relive one aspect of that day, when I felt like my love for Kathy and everyone and everything else I loved was quadrupled in intensity in the fiery furnace of that trial.
As for the Carthage mailbox, the oldest message there is actually a set of four large messages from Caleb Sjogren’s mom, Jan- an extraordinarily vivid journal of her experiences when she volunteered for the Salvation Army at Ground Zero in the fall of 2001. (She forwarded the journal to me ahead of being a guest on the morning show.) Otherwise, the oldest message in the inbox is from about ten months later: a note to “Mr. Berg” from a brand new voice student of mine named Trevor Parker. By the third message from him (about a week later) I am “Greg” and that’s what I’ve been ever since. But it is so fun to revisit the earliest days of what has become a cherished friendship. In that mailbox I can also retrace moments of delight such as when I received a lovely note from Barbara Campbell (the President’s wife) praising me for my anthem “Great and Glorious Light” which she had just heard for the first time. . . or much more painful experiences such as losing directorship of the Chamber Singers. (I still have every email which documents every step of the journey, from the first ominous signs that changes were afoot to the last thank you notes from students.)
So much of my life is in these emails and I just can’t bring myself to dump them. But as with any sort of Hoarding, I need to take some time to sift through what is just sitting there gathering dust, of no possible interest to me or to anyone else, and get it out of there so I can get to those messages which are worth keeping and which I might want to revisit.
I’m just waiting for that sprained ankle, so I can get started.