Inside Out

Andrew Wigger

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During the past week, I took some time off to go back to Moncks Corner to visit my family but this was not a random relaxing visit where I just went home to watch TV and have fun. No, instead it was work.

Let me explain. My mother recently informed me she is moving and will be leaving the duplex we have lived in since I was 16 and moving into a house. While I am happy for her because she gets to live in a house, this meant I had to clean out and pack up my old room. Since I lived in the house since I was 16 and only moved out for good in 2014, I had a lot of stuff there, and I do mean a lot.

This task took four days to complete, which in retrospect is not that long. I am going to start off by saying I am what my sister Elizabeth calls a pack rat. I see it more as me being sentimental and her being a minimalist. To her joy, I was ruthless, giving up items I have had for years and allowing some charities to have way more stuff than they wanted.

During this purging process, I came across many items that reminded me of when I was young and did not have a care in the world. Some of the stuff I came across, which mostly came from my closet, included old toys, old newspapers and other relics.

One of the most common items was old toys that for some reason or another I kept. You never realize how much you were into something, like dinosaurs or Pokemon, until you are digging the toys out of the closet. As I unboxed these old toys, it reminded me of the days when all I had to do was play in the yard with my dinosaurs.

Today, all I do in the yard is cut grass, so the toys I came across were packed up and donated. Hopefully some little boy or girl will be able to enjoy them. During the great closet adventure, I also came across some costumes from my college days. These included Ghostbusters, Spider Man, Thor’s hammer and Jason Voorhee’s machete.

No, I really have not changed much since I was a kid.

Some of the most interesting items I came across were newspapers — specifically two editions of The Newberry Observer that pre-dated me working here.

I had to ask myself why I kept them. My initial thought was that I must have written something for Dr. Jodie Peeler’s class that was published, so I did a quick scan of all the bylines. That was a bust because there were no Andrew Wigger bylines. So I went through the papers to determine why I kept the papers.

The first one smacked me right in the face as I saw a picture that included me from my Newberry College days. It was a simple picture and a cutline of those of us who were named Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and College.

The second newspaper was a little more difficult, as there was no picture of me this time. I almost threw this paper away because I could not understand why I kept it, but then I found it: During my senior year I organized a Toys for Tots drive at Newberry College. I had forgotten that the school wrote up a brief release on the drive and started out with my name for organizing it.

What actually caught my attention were the pictures that ran with the article. They were of the person living next to me in the dorm donating toys. As I was re-reading the articles, it kept going through my mind that I was part of The Newberry Observer before I was even a staff writer here.

A lot of random items I came across I will consider relics. Granted, they are nowhere near old enough to be relics.

I came across old CD cases, a boombox, my graduation caps and gowns and a lot of other stuff. As I packed, threw away and gathered items to donate, I kept thinking of the past. It was strange, but I could remember how I came to own many of these items. Either they were gifts from my parents, I saved up to buy them, a family member gave them to me and so on.

This process became increasingly difficult because some things just had to be donated or thrown away. In some cases, I could not make a decision and left it to my mom to decide. My room is now just filled with some furniture and boxes that would not fit in my Jeep.

The new “fun” part will be unpacking the boxes I brought back with me. After I finish that, I will have to go back to my mom’s house to find the items I could not find. I just hope I can find them.

Oh, and I almost forgot: We have to actually move Mom from one place to another.

Andrew Wigger is a staff writer for The Newberry Observer and can be reached at awigger@civitasmedia.com. Views expressed in this column are those of the writer only and do not represent the newspaper’s opinion.