What I Am

I"ve spent some of last and most of this long weekend sorting through boxes of old stuff. I had boxes in the garage that I still hadn't opened since I moved here in July. And there were plenty of other boxes, that I knew were full of stuff that would eventually need to be sorted and lots of it thrown away. I've been moving from place to place hauling all this stuff with me. I get so terribly attached to it. Or just the memory of it. Or the memories in it. I'm not completely sure. But if I was going to do this, I would have to be ruthless. I would have to make myself part with things I put away and never thought about again until it was time to move and then I realized, well, I should probably go through that stuff and get rid of some of it. But the thought was too much. I put it off. And put it off some more.

Last weekend I started in the garage with a box of video tapes. Yep, VHS. I had two boxes full. And those things are heavy. Moving them from place to place was made pointless by the fact that I don't even own a VCR anymore. But I had to look through them. See what I had in there. Videos I haven't played in years, but hadn't yet replaced with DVDs, if I ever would. There were lots of recorded tapes of stuff I taped off the TV. Back when there wasn't any other way to see something again. I chucked all of them. Then there were the tapes of music videos. The videos of Tori Amos, and Morrissey and others. Concert films. And then movies. I tried to keep them in my head, ones I planned to replace. Others, I had no real desire to ever see again, and can't even remember why I bought them in the first place. I tossed them all. I was brutal. I had to be.

After I emptied those boxes, I came to the one box for which I had no idea what it contained. It was one of those boxes my parents packed up at the old house in New York. They never opened it when they got here. Just put it on a shelf in their garage. Then when they moved this last time, they gave it to me. We think this is yours, they said. They had no idea what was in it either. It wasn't labeled. And it has sat in my garage for 10 months now. Finally, I would open it. And look what I found: trophies and plaques and medals, awards from school and sports. Varsity letters. My bronzed baby shoes. Stuff I kept in the bottom drawer of my nightstand in my childhood bedroom. I can see it exactly as I left it. Mom and Dad just dumped it all in a box and years later, here it all was.

That was last Sunday. So during the week at work, I began to plan for the next round. This weekend I would have four days to delve deep into the recesses of my past. First up, the footlocker. I have two footlockers. One that I spray painted outside and wall papered inside and covered with stickers. I took it with me to college, freshman year at Syracuse, when I roomed with Hina. The second, my actual army footlocker. Again, covered in stickers, mostly of places I've been. Used as a coffee table as recently as when I lived in Utah. I had some idea of what was in them. But could not have imagined the reality.

Footlocker one was filled with manilla envelopes, clasps neatly fastened, labeled in my own writing. Military photos. Poetry! hand written in high school. And letters, hundreds of letters and cards. I have somehow managed to keep every card and letter I ever received from anyone while I was in the army. Letters from Mom and Dad, and George and my aunts and grandparents. But also, from teachers, and coaches, and friends. Childhood friends. High school and college friends. Army friends, even an Army Chaplain. Friends from every stage of my life. I could see from the envelopes that these letters were sent to me at Fort Jackson during Basic Training. Then at Fort Gordon, then at Fort Carson, then in Darmstadt, Germany.  Then some after I got back home to New York.

The first footlocker also contained some ridiculous items. Bank statements, cancelled checks, and even ATM receipts! I got out the paper shredder. I opened every envelope and shredded everything that had my name or other personal information. I tossed the rest. I ended up with a big bag of trash. There were wall calendars from 1986, 1992, 1993. Date books. Notebooks. Manuals. An envelope with the dried petals of a flower I was given by an old army boyfriend. Old photos. Pay statements. A few old exam booklets. Things probably best lost to time.

But as I delved deeper, I found hand written notes from Hina and others that we wrote in school and passed to each other during class, folded into complicated shapes. Print outs of the primitive email system we had in 1988-89 on dot matrix paper. Messages from friends and even from some of my ball players, from when I managed the baseball team. One young guy always asking if I thought the coach would ever play him. In those messages and notes, I was brought back to that time. The trivial things that concerned us. The inside jokes we shared. Then there were the copies of the newspaper, with my byline in the sports section, reporting on my baseball team. Hina and all our friends writing all the other articles. We did it all. And I kept it all. Poems I wrote about baseball too. I remember at the time, Ms Sylman, my English teacher, told me that one day I'd write about other things. And I have, but I came back to baseball time and again too.

Then it was back upstairs to my office. For the piles of papers which included all the materials from my teaching days, lesson plans scribbled on the back of flyers, and even some favorite student papers that I kept. Grade sheets. Teacher evaluations. I reluctantly got rid of all of those. I kept my own school papers, essays and fiction, with notes from professors. An academic paper I presented at a conference. A trail of my development as a writer. Tomorrow I'll open the other footlocker, which I'm pretty sure holds all my old journals. And the little notebooks, with the black marble covers that I wrote stories in as a teenager. Juvenilia! (If I may be so bold.) I think I'll transcribe some of it, maybe most of it. Make computer files that can move with me much more easily. But can I really let go of all those handwritten pages? I don't know. There's plenty of time to figure that out still. First I've got to get typing, or scanning, or absorbing. Reading it all will takes weeks, months even. And it will make me laugh, and cry, and shake my head. It will make me remember who I was, who I am still.