National Clean Your Filing Cabinet Day was celebrated in November by literally dozens of very bored people around our country.

While the mainstream media didn't pay much attention to this event - tending to focus on news and such - I did. Looking at my overflowing filing cabinet back in the fall, I knew the time was near for its annual cleaning, which I do once every five years.

But it being football season, I put it off until last Wednesday, which forced me to put off celebrating both Northern Hemisphere Hoodie Hoo Day and Larry Hovis' birthday, which I plan to recognize in July.

The task was arduous - basically 14 years of financial, personal and business papers to sort though, all crammed into a two-drawer filing cabinet behind my desk.

While it may not seem like it from the swamp of papers billowing from this metal creature, I file everything for a reason. I think, well, this may be something I need in the future, or this is a good idea I need to remember, or this is something I may need to save to keep me out of jail.

What I found particularly vexing - and this took up the majority of the day - was trying to figure out why I had saved some of the items stuffed into my files and what I was thinking when I named these files.

For instance, I had one very large file titled "CYA." I couldn't remember what "CYA" stood for - I assume it is an acronym of some type - so I just threw the whole file away.

Another file was named "Papers." In it were copies of newspapers dating back to 1994. Why would I want to save a Waycross Journal-Herald from June 16, 1997? I looked through, couldn't figure out why, so that hit the garbage as well.

Some papers I realized their significance - the edition with my grandmother's obituary, my job announcement almost 14 years ago to this day, a story from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when my father coached the high school basketball team to the state championship. Those, I kept.

I also found it difficult to discard of a file called "Photos." In it were photos from our newspaper, predating my arrival by a couple of hundred years. There were pictures of our downtown from the 1920s, a picture of my grandfather coaching his youth football team and, of course, pics of a slew of people who brought in large fruit, dead animals and, for some reason, an eight-foot-tall bamboo cane. The picture of the man who brought a live water moccasin into the newspaper office was rather blurry.

I also spent a long amount of time sorting through, and laughing and grimacing at, a file entitled "Letters." In this file, I have saved every letter written to me over the last decade and a half - including ones that never made it to print because they weren't signed or were too vulgar, or usually, both.

There was a gracious letter from the president of the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club, aka, the "Presiding Goober"; ripping rebukes from someone calling himself Lord Mortimer Peppercorn; and dozens of long-handed, long-winded, conspiracy-riddled sagas from our incarcerated. I put them back in the file.

There were other personal files - all with paper mementoes that brought back vivid recollections. Oh, if only these filing cabinet walls could talk - then I could make millions with my "Talking Filing Cabinet Walls" exhibit.

File that under the "Ideas" column - which I didn't touch. I didn't get past the "Letters" file. I guess that will have to wait until the next annual National Clean Your Filing Cabinet Day - in five years.

Len Robbins is editor and publisher of The Clinch County News.