EVEN A PACK RAT GETS A DAY OF SUNSHINE

Pack rat. Put in print that way, it seems a horrible self-description, yet one people embrace for an almost universal, if not life-threatening weakness. People hate to part with their stuff.

We supposedly live in a disposable society. How then do you explain self-storage businesses? If ours is a throwaway culture, why are there so many garage sales?

In general, people are slow to recognize junk as junk. Like wine, junk needs a bit of age (along with a musty bouquet) to come into its own. Junk displays itself most convincingly with years of inattention and a layer of dust.

Then, in a realization that almost beckons the word "Eureka," you stumble across an item deemed at some point valuable enough to keep and it dawns on you: This is junk. What were you thinking to keep it around?

Some things never become junk: old love notes, nice oak furniture, photographs, books you enjoyed and even some you didn't. For the rest, memories and the stuff you need to make everyday life possible get you by.

Still, they made attics and basements and crowded corners of garages for a reason, specifically for the type of person who sees possession as nine-tenths of life. To have and to hold is a nice matrimonial sentiment, but as a philosophy of life, it tends to stack up the closets.

I've come to grips with this recently in cleaning out my desk at the office. Find in this no hint of rehabilitation; pack rats don't kick the habit so easily. This is moving day for our newsroom; before the sun sets today, this staff will move its operation from one side of the building to the other. There are new desks and everything. The general instruction to the news people: travel light.

Waste baskets are doing brisk business here.

Memory lane typically carries with it a certain romance ... one missing here, however. The currency of any paper is, for the most part, paper. A lot of what piled up in the seven years since I lighted at this desk had an origin in pulp.

In this curious bit of desk excavation, there is something of a science, a sort of archaeology without leaving the air conditioning. Just as civilization is now unearthed upon civilization in some desert dig, I plowed deeper into a pile of saved documents and reports and studies and notes, going back year by year.

It's a wonder I didn't find disco at the bottom of the stack.

Still, what was I thinking in saving a 1986 "Miami Vice" calendar, the thoughtful gift of one of our syndicates? For a dozen months, Crockett and Tubbs stared back from the pages with stubbled chins and burned-out expressions. Perhaps, in the dying days of that year, I felt camp was worth preservation. In the current mood, it found the trash bin.

Legal pads contained notes of stories and issues long resolved. Some issues did not go so quietly; a letter from the late 1980s quoted scripture and condemned gay lifestyles in paragraphs of whopping length. Two years later, the same author expressed the same sentiments with the same scripture ... and giving no quarter to the reader, the paragraphs were no shorter.

There were thank-you notes from people who seemed genuinely to mean it, and biting notes from people of like passion. I filed most of both types, but took a few minutes to read again the nice ones; you can always use a lift, even if the compliments are years old.

Not all the findings were made of paper. There was a large floppy disk for a computer system hauled off years ago, a microdisk a new computer claimed could not be initialized (terminal illness for any microdisk) and a bottle of Liquid Paper whose contents had long before turned into tiny, white flakes.

Tossed, tossed and tossed.

Some of this activity (that which I didn't deem intrusive on my workday) I found cleansing. There is something to be said about trading old stuff for new stuff. What it lacks in character and history, it makes up with ... well, brand-spanking newness.

No substitute exists for some parts of the past. There are weak imitations at times. (Robert De Niro shouldn't have bothered improving the Robert Mitchum role in "Cape Fear," for instance.) Sometimes, the original can't be bettered.

And sometimes, space must simply be made in one's life for special artifacts. My youngest son went to a St. Louis Cardinal game with a friend this summer, reveling in uncustomary good seats, a few rows above the home team's bullpen.

A woman struck up a conversation with the boys and made good on a claim she made to finagle a foul ball from players in the bullpen. Not enough balls came that way, however, for my son to get one. He was not disappointed, though. The woman had told him she would get a ball and mail it to him.

Hearing this story, my wife and I gulped hard, a bit miffed some stranger would set our son up for such a letdown. It seemed a cruel trick, one callously played on a young boy enamored with baseball and believing in some woman he had never seen before and would never see again.

Before a week passed, a box came in the mail to my son's attention. Bless my cynical soul, a ball was inside, a scuffed Rawlings, the National League model with William D. White's signature attached. It was autographed by Lee Smith, then the Cardinals' bullpen ace.

My son lit up, never once thinking this package wouldn't arrive or this promise wouldn't be kept. My advice: Carry this ball into your old age, kiddo ... always make room for it. You've got plenty of disillusionment ahead, so cherish this wonderful deed.

A pack rat needs a ray of sunshine once in a while.