Pressed between the pages....

Lately I have been going through boxes in my attic that are full of things that I've carried from place to place over the span of my life.  They are mementos of times gone by and include everything from greeting cards and scrawly art projects to tiny clothing I once wore and ticket stubs with fading ink.  Next to the tub from which I am pulling things is an empty one where I put things I want to keep holding on to.  Some things go in there automatically - tiny shoes, my first doll, cards and letters from grandparents who are no longer here with us.  Some things I dwell on...touching the past in a tangible way and reveling in the memories once more.  Not all the memories are good, but they are all significant in some meaningful way and are part of the mosaic of who I am.  Products of my past.

A sampling...

A card given to my grandfather from my grandmother.  Inside she expressed her love for him in her elegant script and touching it brought tears to my eyes that turned to laughter.  She closed her inscription with the phrase "have a nice day" and that adorable innocence is how I remember her. I may never know if she was really cheating at Yahtzee or just forgot how many times she rolled...

Piles of letters written by my mother whenever I was away - summer camp, school trips, college, student teaching abroad.  She wrote of all the things that were happening in her world, leavings with a splash of home in the midst of whatever strange experiences in which I found myself immersed.  She signed every single one of them "Love ya, Mom" in her familiar hand.

A program for a Meatloaf concert and numerous ticket stubs.  My brother was my concert buddy - still is on a smaller scale.  We would go, for instance, to the Downtown Festival Tent every year to see REO  Speedwagon...even the year that I had just gotten out of the hospital following surgery on my jaw.  So many other concerts that it seemed only fitting that when I graduated from college, he gave me two tickets to see Boston's Walk On tour.  The Meatloaf concert was a deal - I'd go see Steve Miller with him if he'd go see Meatloaf with me. We both loved both concerts.

An envelop full of high school graduation documents showing various accomplishments in the face of what I have increasingly come to see as a very difficult time in my life.  People sometimes say that high school was the best time of their lives.  Not me.  I never felt I fit in anywhere and yet it was a formative time that laid the groundwork for all the successes that came after.  In the face of adversity (of, honestly, a very mundane kind), I made it.  That envelop represents that to me.

A book of early poems.  Oh, they are so wonderful in their juvenile awfulness. The childish scrawl, the teddy bear cover...all of it.  Painful rhymes, choppy rhythms....but there are nuggets there that, again, laid the groundwork for what I think is better, wiser, stronger poetry of which I can be proud.

These things are all special to me - and there is so much more.  I am thinning the collection some.  There are things whose importance has been lost in time and the fog of the past.  There are things of which I am ready to let go.  There are things that just seem silly now.  But all of it begs the question of what will it all mean someday when I am gone?  I think of this sometimes when I find myself shifting through a box lot at an auction with my dad.  Old letters and postcards in flowing script describing someone else's faraway home in a faraway time.  And I'm not sure we value the paper of now as we value the paper of old.  So perhaps it will all someday be recycled and pass out of time and space.   For now, though, they will stay close to me and mine, weaved into the person I am, the person I was, and the person I will someday be.