Paper Trails

My wife recently procured a paper shredder for her home office. Privacy experts may recommend shredders so that people can shred bills, credit card and bank statements, and other items which could be used to threaten personnel privacy. It’s a cool little tool, and I don’t think she spent a fortune on it. It’s kind of fun to feed various paper documents into it to watch the machine chew up the paper into tiny little strips, quietly grinding the forms away like a hamster building a nest of newspaper.

Blogger and His Pop

Playing around with the hungry little beast reminded me of one of my Dad’s last requests before he passed away. He lived like a hermit in his little senior’s apartment in Mesa Arizona, and he was always reluctant to let me enter when I would occasionally visit him. He would come out and visit me in the recreation center or just outside the recreation center with all the other rebelliously smoking seniors. His reasoning was that his apartment was just too messy.


On one visit with my Dad, he mentioned that he was getting more junk mail then he could handle, and he was having problems disposing of all of it. He was worried that if he just tossed it, that someone might be able to get information about him from the trash, information he did not want to share. He mentioned that he might need a shredder to help with the situation, and I told him that I would remember to pick up a shredder for him the next time I was going to visit.


Time passed, visits came and went, and I always seemed to forget about the shredder. He did not really mention it again, but occasionally I would remember the request. Perhaps I would see an ad in the paper, or walking through a store I might have seen a display of office products that would remind me about Dad needing the shredder. But I never really pursued the act of actually purchasing one.


It was a cool January day that my brother had to call me at work to tell me that my father had passed away unexpectedly and completely alone. I won’t dwell on that sad experience except to say that eventually my brother and I had to go over to Dad’s apartment and clean it out. We were shocked when we went in and saw stacks and stacks of letters and junk mail. I am talking tens of thousands of letters, many still in the original envelopes and never opened.


Dad must have been entangled upon every junk mail list in America. ‘You May Already Be A Winner’ envelopes, charity requests, coupon flyers, Senior Citizen advertising, investment and banking solicitations. The entire apartment was filled overwhelmingly with junk mail of every type. My poor Father was being literally overrun with solicitous begging by post.

I’m not writing this to pontificate on the alarming burden our society placed on my father and seniors like him by ‘marketing American style’. All I really want to communicate here is…there really was no excuse for me to forgo spending a few bucks to buy Dad a ‘flippin’ shredder. He would not have asked if he did not need one, Dad was not like that. He really needed one, and I failed that opportunity for doing a tiny bit of service. Lesson learned, let’s hope I don’t shred any future service opportunities.






Thanks and Cheers --- NCA