Despite my plan to be rid of The Pile by the end of the Christmas holidays, it persists. So this morning, after momentarily entertaining myself with a few excuses, I started eating the elephant again.
After repairing all of the damage following my most recent lapse of discipline (throwing the most recent trash away) and getting to the actual progress, I happened across a box I’d marked FSR. That stands for “For Sentimental Reasons,” and it’s my shorthand for a box that contains ticket stubs, old drawings, newspaper clippings, and such. I recognized the box as one I’d moved intact for 10 or 12 years, and I had an idea what was in it, but hadn’t really been through it in that long.
I went through it this afternoon. There’s my 1985 Oxford High School yearbook, underneath my AD&D books. Here’s a box of little stuff, with a “Vote Against Annexation” button, a 1988 Aerosmith ticket stub, silly little Post-Its from a Madison Books & Computers coworker for whom I had long carried a torch, and a couple of glurgy bookmarks Mom gave me.
To my delight and disgust, I also discovered some of my old writing–as in a big pile of stuff I wrote when I was 16 and 17 years old. I found a journal I kept for a month or so, and what looks to be most of the papers I wrote for English, humanities, speech & drama, and American history my junior and senior years in high school.
I read all of the journal, and smiled a couple of times. I had a crush or two I’d forgotten, and I’d described a fishing trip with Dad in a lot of detail. But mostly, I cringed. The gravity with which I’d set down such trite crap depressed me. I was the only kid ever who couldn’t get in a girl’s head or who occasionally didn’t get along with his boss at a foodservice job. Yeeeesh.
The papers were worse. They were dripping with all of the same clichés, but shoehorned into whatever format the teacher de l’année required. Also, the papers on topics that I obviously didn’t choose had that attractive stilted quality about them.
I liked every English teacher I ever had in one way or another, and I loved my humanities teacher. I felt a lot of sympathy at the thought of them having to wade through all this dreck every time they assigned a paper.
Nevertheless, it was a useful exercise. It was serious to me at the time, and I’ll have boys going through all the same stuff soon enough. I believe I’ll keep those writings around as a perspective restorative.
As a result of today’s exploration, I do wonder, somewhat darkly, how WmWms will read to me 20 years from now.
