Digging up the past

Long long ago in a galaxy far far away, your humble correspondent attended a creative-writing class. One of the students in the class submitted a poem which included a couple of lines that have stuck with me ever since, regardless of whatever merit the poem as a whole might have had.

The sands of time bury the past. Without them, life would cease.
But sand can blow away sometimes, revealing hidden graves.

Since I've been doing a little personal archaeology myself lately, I felt a certain degree of kinship when I read author and Inferior 4 + 1 blogger Paul Witcover's description of his excavation of a trunk of personal possessions that had remained locked since his college days.

Paging Geraldo....
Open, Sez Me
Diving into the Wreck : Day 1
Dumpster Diving : Day 2
My Back Pages : Day 3
Scraping the bottom of the barrel : Day 4

My boxes and trunks of debris (and blowing sand) contain similar notebooks and stuff. So why aren't I a successful author? The fault, dear Cassius, is surely in my stars.