Just a few days after the purchase of my first house, my dad showed up unannounced, happily deposited seven boxes on our front porch, and then drove off with a wave. Since I didn’t get around to buying my first house until I was aged 38, he was mighty pleased to clear out their storage space for their own junk.
Those boxes were transferred to the attic of my first house, where they sat unopened for seven years. Then we moved them to our current house, where they sat in our basement for another twelve years. Last month, our hot water heater burst turning that corner of the basement into swamp land. Considering the amount of junk down there, it was remarkable how little was actually trashed.
One of those teenage memory boxes was too close to the boiler, but I was able to scoop out its contents from the sodden box in time. Inside I found notes from friends, transcripts, letters, and other assorted important things that I had collected during the 1980s, that period between high school and the early grad school years.
I’m sorting out all those papers on a large folding table, giving letters back to friends and tossing almost everything. I’m also feeling nostalgic for that time before the Internet where there was some permanence to words and a physicality to our memories. Gen-Xers were young enough when the Internet happened to become digitally fluent, but were old enough to know a world without cellphones, email, and social media. We straddled that line between the past and the future, and probably experienced the best of both.
Read more at Apt. 11D, the newsletter
Apt. 11d 