It can be hard, when one has lived in a place for 50 years, to sweep out the corners, the closets, the dust-filled attic rafters and get rid of the items one has accumulated, as every item is a memory. Such was the case last week when I finally cleared out the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom of our Jersey City apartment. Above the stained pink porcelain sink is a cabinet, deep and wide, shielded by a mirror and containing the artifacts of three generations. The bottles that had collected had never exceeded the ample space. So there was room for everything. First, I threw out an empty bottle of ampicillin dated Sept. 5, 1984. I remembered how Katie had had to take the medicine to prevent the gash on her shoulder from becoming infected. She’d gotten that injury after the roof of the temple caved in during Herb Schreiber’s bar mitzvah. Things caved in a lot that summer. The gym of Benny’s school, the tent over Bertie’s wedding reception, the ceiling of the roller rink, which had happened just as several people were doing the “Y” in YMCA and caused numerous hand sprains. The bar mitzvah had caused the most injuries. However, the adults were able to stop the bleeding by using “I went to Herb’s bar mitzvah and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” shirts as tourniquets. Katie wouldn’t let me throw hers out. The next item I tossed out said simply, “Dec. 4, 1973, County Animal Hosp., Buck.” Buck was a dog who had to take medicine to stop barking backwards. Although this might seem like a minor problem to you, it is really tiresome to hear “Krab, krab, krab” all day. Thanks to an irritable neighbor with a big snow shovel, Buck lived to the ripe age of 14 – in dog years. I also came across, in my medicine cabinet, some pain killers from1979. They reminded me of the day that simultaneously, the we learned there of the hostage crisis in Iran and my daughter Sue fell out of our oak tree and broke all of her teeth. We took her to the dentist and then tied a yellow ribbon around the tree. The fourth item I found was a bottle of Mercurochrome. This is especially significant because I skinned my knee on the way to the taxi to go to the hospital in 1978 when I was pregnant with my fifth daughter. We named her Mercurochrome as a result. No one talks much of Mercurochrome, the medicine, much these days, but in my daughter’s college, everyone is well aware of Mercurochrome Hannah Ostromowitz, star forward for the basketball team. When I got up to the calamine lotion and was reminded of the skinny-dipping story, I realized I was making a mistake. I took all of the medicine out of the wastebasket and put it back. Maybe next year. As a footnote, I did feel guilty, so I took the cabinet off the wall and rescued the 1,203 razor blades we’d slid back there. Each one reminded me of a different man who had visited while I was raising the girls. Ah, the memories. Can’t live without them.