Quelle trip down Memory Lane I have started. After I finally sorted and stored my various crafts stuff in lots of little boxes, I hauled out my file crate, like a milk crate but collapsible and twice as long and with rails for hanging folders. I think in the summer of 1991, when I bought these supplies, I was Turning over a New Leaf and Being Disciplined and Organized as part of my Embracing Life as an Ascetic. I was going to be an ascetic because it went well with involuntary celibacy; as it turned out, I was a hedonist. Though a celibate one. Anyway, these files. "Articles," not further categorized. Rock and roll got its own folder, though. Clothing (my taste hasn't changed much in nearly 15 years, but I doubt the black velvet v-neck dress from J. Crew is still available, or that I would look any good in it). Veronica. Artwork. Fugly. Resumes and recommendations. School records. Financial aid.
I threw out maintenance records for Fugly and the warranty on long-gone Veronica (though I did keep, for nostalgia, the checks recording her purchase). I found artwork from MCB and Reese that can easily go in the copy boxes of correspondence (never to be weeded). I found my own artwork, which can go into a copybox of my own stuff, and a bunch of stuff for my scrapbook. I didn't start keeping all of my stuff until fifth semester, and even then, did I keep coursework from Stats 110V? I did not. If I should ever want to reread my notes from History 261 (Great Britain to 1603), I can. And my bluebooks. That's as far as I got Sunday: then we went to the gym.
Tonight we (a different we) are going to Freak Train, and the really fun folders are done: I'm not going to weed much, if anything, from my schoolwork folders. I combined a few things into a history of lisa folder, like the insurance report from when I witnessed a bike v. car collision in 1993 and how I bought Shoreline Pizza a new sign after knocking down their old one in 1992* and my acceptance into the National Honor Society in 1985 and notification of academic probation in 1987. Then comes more recombining into boxes, the new history folder and artwork into the journal box and the feeling tidy. I have three formerly white but aged and dingy copy boxes full of journals and letters in my study closet, and I have a scrapbook that includes not only invitations to parties and weddings and programs from plays but also ticket stubs from movies and flights, and as long as all of this stuff is in its place, just keeping it doesn't make me untidy. The boxes, two at the time, made an excellent stand for two more boxes on their sides that held hair accessories and hosiery and jewelry in our pre-furniture apartment days.
My first computer, a Macintosh SE, I named Veronica. I was collecting friends in threes at the time, and I decided Elvis Costello's "Veronica" from Spike and Veronica Sawyer from "Heathers" and my computer would be a good threesome. When I bought it from a satellite store of the Co-op, they didn't allow check purchases for over what sum I forget. They sold furniture and computers so this was pretty stupid, and of course I didn't have a credit card, plus there was a $400 per day limit from an ATM. I should go to the ATM five days in a row and keep $1600 in cash in my room before a final $200 withdrawl and purchase? I finally talked the clerk into allowing me to pay by check. That was November. When I went home for Thanksgiving, I found a letter from my bank announcing insufficient funds. I was mortified: I had promised the clerk I had the money and the check would be good, and it wasn't. I sped to the bank, got a cashier's check, and sped the 50 miles to Storrs, getting to the store just before closing, slobbering apologies all over the clerk, who appreciated and accepted my groveling. More accurately, I had had the check deposited: my boyfriend was going to the ATM and I asked him to deposit my father's check. He did, but to my savings account like a goon. So there was the bounced check fee and the cashier's check and the scurrying to the store and the groveling and all was well.
Before I borrowed a thousand dollars from my father for Veronica, I asked him if he would let me pay him back. He wasn't good at letting my sister or me pay him back for outright loans, and there was no question that his assistance with my college tuition was a gift. But this time he let me. Also he let me pay him back when I borrowed another $500 only a couple of months later to fix Fugly's wispy brakes.
The day I bought Veronica, I lugged her home, in her big box, about a half a mile. She wasn't a particularly heavy computer for the time, but the box was awkward and its handles broke and blistered my skin. I was nearly home when SLH yelled from his window, "Polly, what are you doing?" and ran out and berated me for not asking for help and toted it the rest of the way (the length of his dorm and the lawn between it and mine). For the first time, last year's Yule card came back from his one-time location, "Addressee unknown." I know he's Crippled by Nostalgia as well: he bought an old--1930sish--UConn yearbook at an antiques sale and loved how its owner had kept track of her classmates over the years and we examined the declining handwriting together and imagined how the book had left her former possession during an estate sale. Dear SLH, I do miss you.
In 1993, living with RDC and inheriting his first PowerBook, I gave Veronica to CLH for Christmas. She, in turn, gave it to friends with whom she crashed for six months. Dear old Veronica, you were great but I don't miss you.
* Fugly never really recovered from this. She did become tri-tone, getting a new fender in a glarish red that clashed as much as anything else would with her otherwise maroon and beige shell. My parents individually blamed CLH for the accident, since it was her fault for inviting me to Boston for her boyfriend's birthday party and not mine for assuming the truck in front of me was turning right onto a street when I saw its brakelights and and passing on the left except hitting it on the way by and skidding into the sign of the restaurant that the driver cleaned at midnight every night and joining the statistic that most accidents happen within 25 miles (or a half a one) of home. But her timing or choke was off for her next, and last, six months. Dear old Fugly, you were a deathtrap--almost no horn, no emergency brake, dicey steering--but you were freedom and I loved you yet I don't miss you either.
See that? I miss one person and not two machines. That's reasonable, isn't it? Maybe I'm not crippled.
And also, that's my father in a nutshell, financially if not emotionally available. Financially because he could be, to a point, instead of emotionally, which for many years he could not be. He ends most phone calls with "I love you" now, and I am glad to exchange that last sentence with him.
I told Shrink some stories my grandmother told me about her daughter and ex-son-in-law, stories I really wish I didn't know. In this conversation, or maybe to open it, she asked me if my father had ever touched my sister and me or given us a pet. I was horrified by her suggestion--her suspicion?--and exclaimed no, of course not. But she wasn't alleging what I, given her language and my generation, assumed. She was asking about simple physical affection, and it occurred to me some time later that she in turn assumed that my forceful denial meant I was angry about the lack of affection and open to hear what more and worse she had to tell me that day. Another time I remember the generational difference in language is when she and Frisky were cuddling on the couch, he kneading her and she combing him, and her telling me that they were making love. I was pubescent at the time and knew but one meaning for that phrase, not knowing the one from hers: from "It's a Wonderful Life," Mrs. Hatch calls down, "What's George Bailey doing here?" and Mary responds, "He's making violent love to me, mother." And Jane Austen uses that very phrase in Emma, within a carriage one snowy Christmas Eve.
Sunday RDC asked me where his scuba license is. I am not so useful a backup brain as that. Then he asked where that tan corduroy toiletry kit was, and I said probably in either of the two boxes of his miscellany in the furnace room. Copy boxes, of course, labeled RDC. He found the box and found the kit but not the license, which was, shockingly because he hasn't dived in almost 10 years, available in an online database. That he found later. Digging through the box was as amusing as going through my files. I suggested tossing an empty box that once held highlighting markers. That he could manage. There was a piece of plastic that might have served to mount a phone on a wall that he could throw out, and a 1993 map of Mt. Snow that he could not, because it's a souvenir. Most amusing to me (still; I've seen it before) is the group photograph of his 400-person senior class. The hair-or, the hair-or. That box contains, in addition to perfectly reasonable mementos, whatever detritus was on his desk in the Storrs tenement the weekend before we left that he just swept in there.
Last night I went through the most amusing folder, pictures and headlines, some dating to high school, back when I, the extrovert, the exhibitionist, tried to give people a precis of my personality and interests by way of my dorm room door. Some I kept, such as the advertisement cut from Time, probably, of Snoopy holding hands with Charlie Brown and Sally, captioned "Happiness is having a Big Brother or Big Sister." Hmm. Even though Sally wasn't a big sister, I'm not surprised Big Brothers and Sisters of America didn't want to use Lucy to promote siblinghood. I had a collage of aesthetically appealing women, images culled from my weakness for Mademoiselle and wherever else. Other clippings betray my crush on Winona Ryder--Veronica really was a fitting name for my computer--and headlines my gullible fondness for peurile double entendre. I kept the odd comic strip and one copy of the time I was famous in the Daily Campus. But most I am going to send to my sister, because this shit is priceless, at least to her and me.
My high school subscription to Rolling Stone served me well, but I am sure I didn't put the full-page ad for the re-release of "The Wall" on my wall at any time other than freshling year (before I had seen it, but it was Cool) or maybe sophomore, since my boyfriend's favorite band was Pink Floyd, so why the hell did I keep it? Did I think I would have some future need for it? Hieronymos Bosch's Hell has not been my Outward Expression of Private Pain since maybe 11th grade. Clearly, I put all this stuff in a folder and forgot about it long before the web made all such things accessible all the time.
I found a Doonesbury Sunday strip where Trudeau tried to get postmodern: Roger Rabbit opening a door in the background and Mike & Zonk, seeing him, deciding to call it a day. But I didn't find my two favorites, both Sundays in a Walden classroom, with the same professor bemoaning the lack of intellectual curiosity in his classes. In one ends up ranting that black is white, up is down, while students frenetically taking notes say "This class is getting really interesting" and "Yeah, I never knew half of this stuff." In the other, he offers the radar detector as a device legally sold despite its stated purpose being to help a driver flout the law; a student suggests that maybe it's civil disobedience; and the professor nearly falls to his knees: "I have a student! A student lives! Where are you from, lad? Don't be frightened"; while the student thinks, "Am I in trouble here?" They're probably somewhere, on-line if nowhere else.
I was going to shove all this in an envelope for my sister immediately, but I think it needs to be part of a bigger, turning-40 memory extravaganza. Except that all the physical mementos I have are of my life, not hers.
