I unearthed what might be the most significant piece of what will one day be my "history", my childhood scrapbooks. We are finishing up a project at home, making what was once a standard basement, into what is now our "first floor". In the rear, we have carved out a storage area and I personally have been ruthless in clearing it out and saving only those things that absolutely must be. I think I have finally finished gathering and stacking piles of useless items for dump runs and can remove the number of the lovely women who have done them for us off of my speed dial list.
Remember that line in the movie "The Graduate" when William Daniels advises newly graduated Dustin Hoffman to remember the word "Plastics"? I think of that just about every day and now, more than ever. Plastic boxes with tight-fitting lids became the survival route for those things which, over my adult life, I had deemed worthy of at least attempting to preserve. So, wrapped in a large plastic sleeve, I found my two scrapbooks and carefully I turned ancient pages for a trip down the proverbial Memory Lane.
Fear not, boring details will not follow. In fact, I bored myself with some of them. I had a few silent laughs at my adolescent need to save straw wrappers and things I had most likely found on a random street and wondered what I had forgotten, what had been so meaningful to me at the time. By gluing it down, I had committed such items to a lifetime of meaning, relegated them a hierarchy, a place in history. But, for most of those pieces of ephemera, the meaning had been short lived. Why that straw wrapper, that little cocktail napkin, that toothpick or that unidentified half of a movie ticket made it into my book, I know not. I have to trust my self-of-long-ago and attach some value to these little pieces of what was and is, my story.
By the time one reaches the teenage years, it can be assumed that the formative years have completed, with the result being that at age thirteen, the sandwich years have stared and the bridge between childhood and adulthood is in the works. My book seems to have captured a big piece of that action. From what I can tell, it started in the hands of a starry-eyed romantic of a newly-chiseled teenage girl who thought life was going to be an adventure. It follows me as I weave through high school, attend concerts, take vacations, fall in love, feel the warmth of my young friends and my family. I also find so many "certificates", achievement awards from standardized testing. Those became my nemeses. Always the source of angst between myself, my parents, and the nuns who demanded more and more of me than I was willing to put across. After all, the tests revealed a high intellect but, my report cards (also glued down on these pages), told a different story. My story.
Had I been born years later, perhaps my achievements would have been far more reaching. High school curriculums are enriched now, allowing room for creativity and choices. Do they still have "Standardized Achievement Tests"? I wonder. I do know that the term "Attention Deficit" was unheard of back in the scrapbook days and I wonder about that too. I really was born too early. Instead of the tug between those things that I could have done better, my school reports might have revealed a me that was doing the best I possibly could, that I was achieving exactly what I had set out to and that the adventure that I had imagined was only beginning and would never end. I would have been allowed to travel down the path of creativity that I so clearly sought, with guidance and support along the way.
So, I tucked my books back into their sleeves. I returned them to their place in the big plastic box on a shelf, back in the storage area, where they will reside for the rest of my life and where one day, perhaps my children and their families will find them and maybe even take a few moments to turn the old pages before dumping them into a dumpster. My life will go to a landfill, my story finding its way to incineration and sadly, the straw wrappers, the theater tickets, the silly notes and the vintage birthday cards will vanish from the earth as if they never even existed.
