I was supposed to work today, but instead, celebrated the fact that my vacation and sick time have refreshed and took a vacation day. I had a plan, of course, I always have a plan. It was full of such good intentions, involving the laundry and hanging artwork in the kitchen and most importantly, tackling Computer Room #1, which is a time capsule of my former lives, all contained in boxes and bookshelves and scary piles of randomness. And my passport is in there somewhere too. I hope.
But, the truth of the matter is that I don’t feel quite right. Yesterday, Esteban and I trekked down to the valley to shop, and quite honestly, he was driving really sloppily, without very much control on the steering wheel and lots of speeding up and slowing down and then by the time he pointed the car toward home, I was breathing out my mouth and rolling down the car window, despite the fact that it was 34 degrees outside. The motion sickness subsided by the time we got home, but then I made the mistake of watching him play Grand Theft Auto on the Xbox, which was just the push I needed to turn completely green and be unable to look at the television or computer screens or sit in the rocking chair or anything but lie very still with a cold compress on my forehead and an ice pack behind my neck.
And I’ve been fragile ever since, although I can’t really tell if I was susceptible to the motion sickness because I wasn’t feeling good in the first place or if I’m just a spinny-headed idiot. Either way, it makes for a very nonproductive day.
I did make bread though. That’s a slight positive. Warm bread with melted butter seemed to be the only thing that could quell the reenactment of ‘The Perfect Storm’ happening in my tummy, therefore who am I to argue.
Also, I wandered around St. Vincent de Paul, which is something I love to do if I have free time. There’s something very beautiful about the stuff no one wants anymore. You just start picking up these mind pictures about the former owners, can hear their voices floating in the air above the racks and racks of 80’s prom dresses and 50’s grandma house dresses. In some ways, it’s like digging through your own history. This time, I found a copy of the same C Flute instruction book I used to learn how to play flute in fourth grade. There wasn’t a name on it, but there were dates on each of the exercises’ 1982 and 1983. It wasn’t mine, because my book was covered with practice stickers. You got one sticker for every three hours you practiced. I used to lie, and say I’d practice three times more than I really did, because I felt it was a ripoff that you didn’t get something for every hour you practiced. The stickers were day glo orange and green inventory stickers that the music guy had stamped with a harp and cross, since I went to a parochial school. Ironically, I did find a trumpet book with those same day glo orange and green harp/cross stickers on the cover. It had to belong to a boy since the ancient music guy would only let girls take flute, clarinet or French horn. I remember this specifically because when I had wanted to take saxophone, he asked me if I was a little boy or a little girl. He asked me what my favorite outfit was. I replied that it was a blue dress with a silver belt and he handed me a flute.
Whenever I see names on things, I have this overwhelming urge to find those people, call them up and say ‘Here’ I found your Foundations of Arithmetic book from 1978! Enjoy!’ because it just boggles my mind that you would willingly let such intimate portals into your past go away without a fight. When push comes to shove, for most of us, the only thing that will be left of us in three hundred years will be our stuff. And not the stuff that you want to be remembered for, like your class ring or your school photographs. No. It will be anonymous stuff, like your Barbie dream date game or your dresser, where you hid your porn collection under your handkerchiefs and dress socks. That’s the material dandruff that keeps going, with or without us, that’s the stuff that has permanence, even after it’s been sent away on the Goodwill truck or to languish in your parent’s mildewed basement.
The human brain has a great vault in which it stores every single moment, every utterance of your entire life. Sometimes I wonder what a physical storeroom of our every possession would look like. It would have everything you ever purchased, ever received under the Christmas tree or as a prize for pinning the tail on the donkey. There would be tables containing legions of goldfish, each swimming merrily in perpetual circles in their own little bowls. There might be an entire mile of clothes, hanging from smallest to tallest sizes, next to shelves upon shelves of every book you ever owned, including your baby book and the Pokey Little Puppy and that tattered copy of Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret that you had checked out of the library and then left accidentally on the bus and had to pay for out of your allowance.
I have very few reoccurring dreams, but one of my favorite themes is when I suddenly stumble upon a cache of old stuff just like that. The one I remember most clearly was a dream in which I learned suddenly that my Mafia Grandmother never did sell my great-grandmother’s house (the one my great-grandfather built) in the early nineties, but instead, it had been sitting there empty all of this time. Someone had neglected to tell me that it was really mine. And I wandered through the empty musty rooms, up the stairs, into her bedroom, where there were a row of deep closets that had sloping backs due to the slant of the roof. Even in real life, those closets seemed to go on forever, getting shorter and shorter, very Alice in Wonderland. And now that they were emptied of her cedar chest containing her wedding dress, and the mountains of ancient quilts and feather pillows, I could see that there wasn’t really a sloped ceiling at all. In fact, it was a whole other room! I turned the corner and then, voila, stacks upon stacks of our history. There were cases of costume jewelry glittering under dust, there was an entire wall of trophy fish caught by my great grandfather (a legendary sportsman). And then another larger room with every ancient lamp, every stick of furniture from ancestors long passed. The signs from my great grandparent’s and great great grandmother’s restaurants and taverns. The jukebox still containing Glenn Miller and Jimmy Dorsey. Every letter ever written by my uncle in the Great War. Everything. It was all there, waiting for me to uncover them.
I thought about buying two old pairs of ice skates (one black and one white) which would have looked cool hanging in our breezeway, but then I decided it would have been too antiquey, too country kitsch and not match the rest of the house. Besides, currently the breezeway is just being used as a very large soda cooler. Instead I just dropped $5 in the donation box and left.
They say that Generation X is the first to be fixated with recovering their childhoods, fixating upon the past. The Boomers are so quick to move on to the next new thing, swallow whole the world and leave whatever is left in their wake to those who go after them. But maybe we are the first to get how ephemeral life is. Maybe we just understand everything that was lost. Maybe we never wanted it taken from us in the first place.
