Memory Lane is a Lonely Road

My parents finally kicked me out of the house. Okay, technically they kicked my stuff out of the house. It’s true that I bought my first house over twenty years ago but I’ve happily continued to use theirs as my off-site storage facility. When rain flooded their basement, they started throwing things out. However, years of experience has taught them that it’s unwise to pitch things that belong to me without asking first so they skipped that step and appeared at my house with a large box which they unceremoniously dumped on the floor. Dad said, “This is yours. You decide what to do with it.”

The box was labeled ‘Judy’s school stuff.’ I left it where it had landed in my front hall for a couple of weeks while I worked up the energy for a long trip down memory lane. The smell of the box, which had spent multiple decades in a musty basement, finally compelled me to explore the contents so I could decide what to do with them and air out my hallway.

As labeled, the box contained school papers and other treasures from elementary school through high school. A selection of notable finds included a ticket to a production of ‘Lil’ Abner’ that we did in Jr. High that had a bit of Mark V.’s fake mustache taped to it; a letter I wrote to NBC in 1973 protesting the cancelation of Bonanza which, along with letters to Save the Children and the local Board of Selectman, was apparently a school project, not evidence of my precociousness as I originally thought; a tenth grade World Civilization paper marked ‘C-, barely’; and a paper where the teacher wrote, ‘Where’s the argument? I know you like controversy. I see it in class all the time.’ I was surprised to discover that I was not as bad at math as I remembered, or as good at everything else.

Over the course of several days (memory lane is a long road) I tried to engage my daughter in the review of my early years but she was singularly uninterested. I had her intrigued for a minute when I undertook an explanation of mimeograph machines but she wandered off when it became clear that I didn’t actually know how they worked. My husband lit up briefly when I gave him a printout from an early computer which we were teaching to play blackjack (or maybe it was teaching us) but mostly he nodded and said, “That’s nice, dear,” sounding exactly like his own father. I finally resigned myself to the fact that my cherished mementos are never going to become anyone else’s. Down the road when my daughter is cleaning out my basement she’s not going to stop and read my old papers, she’s going to toss them out. I guess I’ll save her the trouble. I kept a few representative things (all the papers that got A’s) and recycled the rest. I’ll have to remember to tell my parents that if they come across any of their school papers while they’re cleaning they should feel free to throw them out.

Mind you, this applies only to items found in the basement. When it’s time to clean out my room I’d prefer they not touch anything without asking me first.