Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [68]
If all this stuff on every surface and wall of my home didn’t mean enough to try to save in an emergency, why was it cluttering up my life? What were all those clothes in my closet doing there if I didn’t like them well enough to bother rescuing them from a fire? And what does it mean that I saved only diaries and photo albums, physical evidence meant to trigger old memories that exist only in my head?
Looking back, the ignored clothes are easy to explain. I was pissed off at them and probably punishing them, for the way they continually disappoint me. When I buy them, it is usually because I think that they will turn me into some new, improved version of myself. Then I catch a glimpse in a mirror, and for some reason, I still don’t look much like that six-foot-tall thirteen-year-old model from the Urban Outfitters catalogue, even though we both have bangs. The truth is, I would have loved to throw them all into a big roaring fire, but my practical nature would never allow it. The threat of a dangerous, uncontrollable natural disaster doing the deed for me was a chance to start all over again.
Same with my knickknacks: things that make me laugh are part of what makes life worth living for me. I love my Pez containers, ceramic dogs from thrift stores, and snow globes from airports. But daily life tempts me with an endless array of equally amusing items. Until I move into the dedicated museum space I so richly deserve, I have just so much shelf space to offer my collections. If I lost every single one of these things, I have no doubt at all that my shelves would again be full in a couple of weeks.
On the other hand, there’s no starting over with ancient memories. Even though I don’t like that many of mine, I feel a certain commitment to preserving all those experiences I carry around in my head, good or bad. The ongoing conversation I can have with the person I was at ten or twelve feels like an odd piece of time travel.
Since I had bothered to save that pink “My Treasures!” box I bought as a kid, I sat down to open it for the first time in decades. Maybe the poor chubby goofball that spent her allowance paying for this thing had left some kind of a message for me inside. I was curious to see what she had to say to her future self, a creature she had never imagined would really exist. I don’t remember her having any long-range plans, except for buying a horse. On that count, I had let her down. Would she be mad at me four decades later?
I opened the lid of the box. The clasp was rusty. It had come with a key that I had stopped keeping track of that first week, after I’d learned that the lock could be easily picked with a paper clip.
At the very top was a neatly folded fancy, fluted, twenty-four-inch white ribbon I’d won in a seventh-grade horse show. I’d been proud of it then, though now I wondered if they’d given one to everyone who entered. Underneath the ribbon was a coffee-stained program for a sixth-grade dance recital entitled “A Chance to Dance.” At first, I wasn’t sure which dance recital this had been. I’d taken a couple of different dance classes when I was a kid. I opened up the cover, and between page 2 and 3, I found a discolored piece of notebook paper. On it were handwritten instructions along with stick-figure illustrations that showed exactly how to perform the dance I had done that night. Apparently, it had been written for some very unlikely moment in the future when I had forgotten how to re-create this timeless magic.
It began, “Stretch, stretch stretch; Down, up, stand, stretch, stretch stretch, down, up, clap, clap clap.