Rainy, cold days are made to tie up loose ends and clean up the past. But sometimes you forget what you had in the first place and it really makes the mind work when you find it once again.
All the holiday decorations and presents and boxes and gift wrap all make for a huge mess. Even for someone like me that doesn’t really do all that much in the way of decorating. My garage was piled high with open cardboard boxes and Christmas light strings and bits of tinsel and whatnot on the floor.
Trying to organize and stuff boxes wherever they would fit I went rummaging round and found an old footlocker that I hadn’t bothered with since college. I dragged this along with me when I left for school back in ’89. Mostly it just got in the way in the tiny little dorm room that I shared with my roommate. Then I dragged it along to a couple of apartments while I was at school to store the miscellaneous junk that one acquires but doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
After college it just automatically followed me wherever I went. Finally I brought it to this garage when I moved in six years ago and I stacked boxes on top and forgot about it till just now. The lock was broken. I broke it years ago when I lost the key. Took all of two seconds to break with a screwdriver which tells you how good a footlocker it was. The hinges were rusty but they opened up easily. A musty damp paper smell blossomed out from within. Not a good sign.
Inside I found everything wrapped up in a bed sheet from some twin bed that I no longer owned. What was the great treasure within?
Big surprise. Books. paperbacks. My original copy of “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy“. All the pages yellowed with age. College textbooks that I must have thought would come in handy in my career or were just interesting. FORTRAN 77. Probably out of date even back then. Hand sketched blueprints for a gear assembly, something I’d done for engineering drafting class.
Three wire bound notebooks. Notes from classes, sketches, doodles, whatnot. On one page two columns of numbers. The first, a set of dates. The second column of numbers steadily decreasing in value down the page. A budget that I’d written down one day. I could make a twenty-dollar bill last all weekend long back then.
My handwriting sucked even back then but compared to now it looked so professional. I need to practice my handwriting more.
Four hardbound books with silver bindings. “How things work” Examples of all sorts of mechanical and electrical devices all laid out in pieces. Beautiful acid free end papers. My old man bought these for me before I went off to college. Still in good condition.
Boardgames that I hadn’t played in ages. A deck of cards used to play Hearts and Spades in the Commons lobby on many a night.
An old hard plastic bag full of rulers, pencils, erasers, and a drafting brush. All the supplies needed for engineering drawings. The plastic bag now hard and brittle after so many years in the heat.
A cheap little sake serving set, a rice bowl, plastic chop sticks, a tatami mat, a bokken, and an incense holder from my “japanese” phase.
Wires, extension cables, 5.25″ floppy diskettes none of those newfangled 3.5 ” diskettes for me, thank you very much. Some old landscape sketches I’d done for art class in high school.
An envelope from Fox photo labs spills out and the garage floor is covered with glossy photos. Sitting on the cold concrete as I look them over. Some trip photos from here and there, blurry and dark bonfire pictures from some November night, some photos of old friends and people who I haven’t seen since school. A photo of Mark, my best friend in college. Rest well, old friend.
It’s getting cold out here.
A different life. I find it hard to connect the person that I am now with the young man who stored all of this stuff back then. Less idealistic? Possibly. Much less naive? I certainly hope so. Definitely more banged up. What do these items say about who I was back then?
I try to think back, try to consider why it was I stored away some of these items. I must have thought that there was real value in hanging onto these trinkets, that maybe one day I would need them. No easy or obvious answers come to mind.
Most of this stuff ends up in a pair of garbage bags. A few items I hang onto and bring into the house. The footlocker itself isn’t in that good a shape. Made from light metal. Cracked in a couple of places, it’s still serviceable but it’ll fall apart one of these days. So out it’ll go on heavy trash day.
If I had to put some things away from my present life and store them for some future date, what would I put away. What would these items say about who I am now?
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