Remember the story of Diogenes and his begging bowl? The bowl was the philosopher's only possession that he used to hold the food he begged. One day he tripped and fell and broke the bowl and said, "At last! I'm free!"

Well, that's how I feel when I toss something I've hung onto for too long, and I wonder why it took me so long. Last week I finally threw out all the negatives of all the pictures I ever took from the very first days when I had a little Kodak box camera, my best camera. Just aiming and clicking, I took the best (black & white) photograph of Lake Louise that my brother, an amateur photographer, ever saw. I stuck it in a frame and hung it over my bed table and Jack used to come into my room and look at the picture and shake his head and say, "You couldn't do it again." He was right, of course. I didn't. I won't go into a history of my cameras now. You can fill in the blanks with your own stories, beginning with the little Brownie, if you're old enough, and ending with the Polaroid, may they all rest in landfill.

I tossed all my cameras long ago with the first of my big down-sizing moves after my husband died, and I culled the accumulation of mementoes and photographs. I had very few pictures, actually, and very few albums. I've always collected notes and letters rather than pictures; words meant more to me than images, that is, sentimental or significant words. When the University of Manitoba committed to take my files for the archives, they didn't realize what they were getting into. If I'm ever really famous, they'll have a goldmine - like the Hemingway treasure trove. In the meantime, the archives give me a place to send my detritus. Except those negatives. They had to go. And I don't have any bullfight tickets.

I did have, however, a bulging file of my dog Tag's life, his medical records and licenses and so on. He survived a bite from a Massassauga rattle snake and I have the bills to prove it. So here's a switch for me: I just tossed his files and kept his pictures.

Next.

I planned to write about this yesterday but Toronto's new (to me) streetcars and elevators interfered. If you read yesterday's blog, though you will have noticed something I wrote in dismay about the stamped transit ticket. "What do I do with it?" Another bit of detritus for the hoard. My subject for today.

Ernest Hemingway was a packrat. A new museum with all his artefacts (when does junk become artefact?) has recently opened and an article in the New York Times reviews it and comments on what he saved: everything, even to used bullfight tickets. Forty-seven different endings to A Farewell to Arms; a letter of protest to Harold Ross (former editor of The New Yorker) about a review H. objected to, but then he never mailed the letter, written in pencil, by the way.

Hemingway preferred to write in pencil, first draft, anyway. He said that a pencil draft received one-third more rewrite. Yes. I know someone who writes his first drafts in a fine fountain pen, liking the noise of pen on paper, and who thinks he gets another rewrite out of that. And I remember reading somewhere that H. liked to sharpen pencils before he started work. Everyone has some kind of ritual, I suppose . I wonder how many pencil sharpeners he owned. I have four extant, all duck-heads (I said dUck). I used to have an electric pencil sharpener; I think it remained on the wall of whatever office I was in then - probably up north. I digress, deliciously. (I'm enjoying this.)

I also remember reading that Florence Nightingale never threw away a piece of paper. Her grocery lists have emerged. I love grocery lists! Speaking of grocery lists, the science fiction writer, Walter Miller (1923-1996), in his wonderful novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz (copyright 1959, published 1960) describes the grocery list of Saint Leibowitz, canonized after a nuclear holocaust has left an abbey in the southwest American desert as a long-term survivor (well, the occupants, of course, but the abbey is the ongoing, "permanent" character in the book). The list, discovered later outside what must have been a fall-out shelter, becomes the focus of illuminated manuscripts painstakingly created by later generations of monks and comprises a grocery list: dill pickles, pastrami and other snack food.

I'm being warned that the battery is low. I think I'll go on tomorrow about packratism and its side effects, good or ill There's another baseball game this afternoon and I have to recharge me for that. Anon, anon.