STRANGER THAN FICTION: PACK RAT AND LIFEBOATER MARRY, DISASTER ENSUES

Who would want a Details magazine form 1992?

There are two kinds of people in this world: pack rats and lifeboaters.

Pack rats save everything, of course, including those handprint-poem thingies their kids made in kindergarten. Every flower they've ever received -- even from dating nightmares who wore high-water pants and glasses with tape -- is pressed into a book. Their kitchen drawers are stuffed with now-useless twist ties.

Lifeboaters live as though they're grabbing a few valuables off a sinking ship. Sure, a lifeboater may hang onto the heirloom ring her grandmother gave her and MAYBE her marriage license, but that homemade Mother's Day card from little Johnny is long gone.

A scientific study conducted in my office Monday revealed pack rats are naturally attracted to lifeboaters. Really! And you can imagine the associated problems.

When The Other Half and I moved into our first apartment, I helped him carry in milk crates full of crap. Yes, crap. Pennants from his mother's senior year at Charleston High School (no offense, Blue Jays). A poster advertising the Mid-South Fair of 1977. The plastic pumpkins he used for trick-or-treating when he was 10.

There were the old magazines and newspapers. He had every issue of every magazine he had ever received. Details. Sports Illustrated. Men's Health.

"What do you plan to do with these, Sweetie?" I asked in the sugary voice of a woman just back from her honeymoon.

"Well, you never know," he replied. "I may need something out of them someday."

"OK," I said, staggering in with my third crate of old newspapers. The Commercial Appeal from Memphis, Tenn., was on top. No huge news event on the front; just an average paper from an average day.

My history is kept in one large cardboard box: All my tax returns. My first three newspaper articles. My high-school diploma. Two photo albums.

We aren't newlyweds any more. Mr. Half and I rented our fourth apartment together in January, when we moved in Pensacola. He asked me to help move his magazines and newspapers out of our Cape Girardeau home.

"ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR EVER-LOVING MIND?" I screamed in reply. "YOU WANT IT, YOU CARRY IT!"

Well, that carefully forced him into action. He got rid of one year's worth of Sports Illustrated.

Ends up the whole pack rat vs. lifeboater thing is genetic. When I needed my passport five years ago, my mother couldn't find my birth certificate. I'm sure she was cleaning out her closet one day, ran across it and thought, "I know Heidi was born. Why should I hang on to this old thing?"

My baby book stops after my first Christmas, and I guarantee you I wouldn't have a baby book at all if my grandmother hadn't rescued it from a trash bin.

Mr. Half's mother is just the opposite. His entire school career is charted on a wall of her home. While staying in her guest room last week, I kept hitting my ankle on an antique rocking horse -- and it was either squeeze past the rocking horse or step on a display of all her childhood dolls.

But the most amazing antique was in her refrigerator. I was looking for the salad dressing and ran across some ranch-flavored stuff in a brand name I'd never seen before. I checked the sell-by date. It was Nov. 3, 1990.

"Oh, I was collecting those bottles," she explained off-handedly. "Aren't they neat?"

I guess there's something to be said for both gene pools. Mr. Half's mother gave him a sense of history, a sense of belonging to a certain time period or a certain family.

My mother gave me the ability to pick up an entire household in four hours.

Hope my kids find a happy medium.

~Heidi Nieland is a former Southeast Missourian staff writer who lives in Pensacola, Fla.