My Precious

I have a cedar chest in my bedroom that’s packed full of yearbooks and dried flowers and graduation robes and notes from my favorite college classes and other things I can’t currently list or even remember that I still have but clearly need to keep forever-and-ever-amen. I have similar personal-history flotsam and jetsam filling more than one cardboard box in my garage. The Boy (usually) refrains from saying anything about the presence of these boxes or the weight of my cedar chest as he knows it’s futile. I fall into the Wonder Women keep-it camp.

But from among all the things I have collected throughout my many years—and a good number of which I insist on carrying with me from state to state, house to house—what would I consider my favorite? What’s the most special? What do I truly treasure? And what was its fate? Do I still actually have it in my cedar chest or in one of the garage boxes?

The further away I get from the age of the new students I take under my wing every fall, the more I realize that teenagers are for the most part still very much children even when they’re in college. If I were to say that to my 14-year-old self, she would be quite offended, of course. So I won’t say it … I’ll instead claim that though they’re technically not from childhood, my pointe shoes qualify as my favorite childhood treasure.

I always loved my leather ballet slippers, but nothing could compare to the joy and pride I felt the first time I tried on a pair of Blochs. Going to pointe class always made me feel willowy and strong. Successfully executing a pirouette en pointe was exhilarating. Coming from pointe class, I was always giddy and flushed. I didn’t drink in high school and maybe it was because I had ballet … it was a pretty potent high.

I still have my shoes, my gels, and even some lamb’s wool in a little blue satchel I made in one of my classes in middle school. I can’t remember the last time I actually opened the lid of my cedar chest to look at the satchel or its contents, but I know it’s there and it makes me smile every time I think of those pink satin remnants of my teens. I toy with the idea of trading my lunch hours for a Tuesday/Thursday Ballet I (slippers only!) class just to see if I can somehow get back into adequate shape to put my pointe shoes on at home and maybe do a relevé or two in the kitchen … but I always chicken out. I think I like preserving the mental picture of myself as a graceful, lithe young ballerina: I would hate to have that picture replaced by my own personal version of “Dance of the Hours” from Fantasia.

Treasured

When I moved back to my homeland and got a house of my own, my mother started showing up with Rubbermaid containers of my old stuff.  Containers and containers of it.  My letter sweater from high school.  Old letters from a pen pal that I started corresponding with in the fifth grade.  Old sorority t-shirts and composite pictures.  Dried flowers from boyfriends long gone.  Programs from junior high volleyball games.  Trophies from when I twirled baton(!!!) in early elementary school.  The list goes on and on.  My mother kept most of the things thinking that I would want them.  I went through them and laughed and smiled as memories flooded over me.  Then, I left those containers in a corner of an unused bedroom and forgot about them.

Part of me wants to toss all of it.  I know my mom kept all of the things that really mean something to her -- my poems from third grade, the cards I have sent her over the years, the paper that documents first time I wrote my name by myself.  I get why she saved all of it.  I am a saver.  Not a hoarder.  I am a sentimentalist.  I love looking at those sorority composite pictures and remembering everyone.  I have a happy memory of nearly every single person on that page.  However, I often wonder what those things would mean to anyone else besides me?  I mean, if I leave this Earth tomorrow, Superman is not going to want my old Junior Miss newspaper clippings.  Superboy will probably never care that I saved a ritual book from when I traveled as a consultant for my sorority.  Neither of them will pore over the stats books from when I broke volleyball records in high school.  Still, most of the things in those boxes will probably be saved for "someday" so that I can look through them again and run my fingers over the faces in those pictures, the engraving on the trophies, and the fuzz on the sweater and smile.

Saving Superboy's things is another thing entirely.  I am such a sap and I want to save everything.  He scribbled on a menu at a Mexican restaurant back in August and I had to physically restrain myself from tearing that menu off of the table when we left.  It is ridiculous, I know.  He loves art and painting and I have so many things that he has "drawn" or finger-painted and I just cannot make myself get rid of them.  Superman jokes that we will need a second house to store all of this "stuff" but he is almost more of a sap than I am about it.  I love seeing the hand prints we helped Superboy make during his first year of life and it makes me smile every time I walk past them in the hallway.  Those tiny little newborn prints nearly kill me.

Of all the things that I have, though, from my childhood, my most prize possessions are probably pictures.  I have Bear, sure, and a quilt my mother made for me when I was a wee little thing.  I love those things, but pictures hold a special place in my heart.  There is a picture of my dad and I when I was just born.  A picture of my mom when she was pregnant with my brother.  A picture of our whole family hamming it up for the camera at my aunt's wedding.  Pictures of my grandparents when their hair was not yet gray and they were traveling the world.  The pictures tell a story -- my story -- and I treasure them more than anything else.

So long, Stuff.

I think I've said it before, but I'm quick to toss Stuff.  He and I are not friends.  I don't become attached to things that people give or create for me.  Instead of sweet sentimental gems, I see it as clutter.

I loathe clutter.

Seeing stacks of my girls' school papers on the table when I come home from work ignites in me a mini panic attack.  To avoid hurting their feelings, however, I'll hang their artwork or "A" tests and what have you on the refrigerator for a suitable time.  Then, when they aren't looking, I'll deposit their "treasures" in the recycling bin.  I'm a terrible mom.

Because I hate Stuff, I've never really wondered about my old childhood things.  Certificates of awards, softball trophies, drama club t-shirts...I haven't seen them in nearly 20 years.  Most likely, my parents tossed them at some point, but it honestly doesn't bother me.  I would probably have tossed them myself if I had them.  The only thing I truly hold dear from my younger years is my quilt which I wrote about here .

For me, it's not about Stuff; it's about memories.  Stuff comes and goes (quite quickly in my home), but the memories that I have from my academic honors, softball glory days, and drama performances will far outlast a piece of paper, an old trophy, or a ratty t-shirt.

I Wonder Why Fate Was So Cruel to the Women this Week?

At first I thought I'd just picked a bad topic . . . but soon I realized that misery had been unleashed upon the Wonder Women, all but me.  (Knocks wood, throws salt over shoulder.)

No, but seriously, my 3 compatriots are suffering some miseries, ranging from minor to major this week.  Please send positive thoughts and prayers their way, and let's hope we're all back to our old, posting selves next week!

Passing this week...

Hi there.  It's me, Super Jane.  Unfortunately, I need to pass on this week's wonder.  I'm so sorry, but my mind is mush. 

My littlest, Baby Angel, broke her elbow on Sunday night during a wrestling match with her sister in the living room.   She had emergency surgery at midnight that night and came out with 3 pins and a big, honking cast.  Life has been a blur since then, so I need a week to allow my life to return to normal.  Hopefully, I'll be thinking clearly by next week. 

Prayers and happy thoughts for my girl are appreciated!  Thanks! 

I Wonder About My Old Childhood Treasure?

I was discussing on facebook recently some strategies for how to deal with preschooler art.  For those of you who have not had the experience of living with a preschooler, allow me to explain - from Minute One of that first day of school, you Preshuss Darling will begin bringing home a metric ton of construction-paper-and-paste confections, the bulk of which (at least in the early years) are actually mostly created by their classroom teacher.  Eventually, the hallmarks of a toddler's touch will become apparent - a half-assed scribble here and there, the inevitable handprint turkey or butterfly (every darn thing has their little handprints on it) - and the art will become less the teacher's and more the handiwork of your unique little Snowflake.  And you will have to face the dilemma of determining what the the ever loving heck to do with all of it?  This PRIIIIIINT of your baby's HAAAAAANDS when he was just TWOOOO and one day he'll be a MAAAAN and his hands will be bigger than MIIIIINE and WAAAAAAAAAH.  What do you put aside to save forever and ever, for those days when your baby's a man/woman and you miss the little kid he used to be (knowing that it will just be clutter that your grown children will one day have to clean out of your house, after you've shuffled off this mortal coil)?  And what can you praise lovingly and loudly, and then slip secretly into the recycle bin at the first opportunity?

This discussion (I'm of the TOSS IT ALL school of thought) got me thinking about a rubbermaid container I have upstairs.  This container is full of preschool art, of pictures and handprints and I LUV YOO MOM scrawled in a child's hand across a notebook page.  The preschooler who created this art was me, and the rubbermaid was a "gift" from my mother who finally decided, about four years ago, that she was done trucking five of these darn things around every time she moved to a new house (which was often).  So she gathered her five children to her, and whispered, lovingly, sweetly, to each of us in turn: "Get your crap out of here now or it's going in the trash."

So now I have a bucket full of crap up there, and even in this latest move when I majorly purged our stuff in order to make it fit in a tiny little POD for the trek 2 hours down the highway, I was unable to touch that container.  I know I need to go through it.  I know I can probably toss most of it.  But it's kind of hard to look at something that has been lovingly cherished for 30 years, and just put it out with last week's papers, you know?  

Emotional baggage aside, it is kind of entertaining to look through the container, as in addition to my old art it also holds many things I used to treasure.  I have a Science Olympics medal which I won in the 6th grade.  I have the Math Counts trophy I won in 7th grade.  (NERD ALERT, am I right?)  I have the petals from a flower that my first boyfriend gave me, over twenty years ago.  (More like, I have an envelope full of dust that used to be petals.)  I also have in there the mix tape he gave me back in those days, which says on it "Name" (he wrote his name) and "Date" (he wrote Yes Please!)  I have my Girl Scout pin and my sash full of badges, with three or four that still need sewn on.  There are honors and awards and certificates, carefully pasted into a scrapbook by me - there is a sticker book that I treasured when I was five, and when I look at it I can still remember carefully organizing my stickers into categories in order to select which pages to put them on ("Prty" and "Animl" are two I recall).  That rubbermaid holds a lot of childhood memories, tied up in a bunch of stuff, and I don't quite have it in me to purge it yet.

I think if I had to pick, of all my dearest treasures, the one I most loved is not in there.  It is gone, forever, victim of my love for it.  Like the Velveteen rabbit, it got all loved up and kind of ruined, and eventually thrown away.  This treasure of which I speak is my Cabbage Patch doll - whose birth certificate I still have, though she is long gone.  I watch my own kid carry his disgusting, deflated, hole-covered, filthy Yellow Bear everywhere he goes, and I wonder if one day he'll remember it the way I remember that doll.  Boy did I love that doll.  

I toss my boys' art day in and day out, exclaiming over it and then putting it out with the recycling before it gets so heavy with emotional baggage that I cannot bring myself to part with it.  I jettison as quickly as I collect, lest I end up some crazy old sentimental lady with a house full of talismans, little pieces of her offsprings' childhoods that she could not bear to lose once she lost the children inside the adults they would become.  It's kind of my way of forcing me to embrace the present, to love whatever phase of life I'm in and not weep over the lovely ones I've left behind.  

God love it, though, that disgusting Yellow Bear will be with me until the day I die.

On Music and MTV

Ever since I was a kid, music has been a huge part of my life.  I truly have a soundtrack to my life.  My dad passed on his love of music to me in a big way.  In the days of family vacations, we would always play music trivia.  We would name the songs, the artists, the year the song was released, etc.  My dad had all of this knowledge in his head and I learned so much from him.  He used to talk to us about arrangements, different genres of music and sampling.  I can easily name any song in one or two notes (given the song is from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s).  I can tell you who sang it and who might have re-made it.

I did not watch a lot of television as a kid.  I did watch some childhood favorites, but the tv was mostly off in our house.  I do not remember spending hours watching MTV, but I do remember loving music videos when I got to see them.  I loved listening to the radio so getting to see the song made into a story was really cool!  I have quite a few favorites, but I will spare you the full list and go with these below:

Bon Jovi - "I'll Be There For You" or "You Give Love a Bad Name":  Hello, Bon Jovi!  I loved me some Bon Jovi.  "You Give Love a Bad Name" will always remind me of the juke box (remember juke boxes!?) at Pizza King.  I loved their videos and I mentioned these two because the videos were awesome.

Bruce Springsteen - "Born in the U.S.A." or "Glory Days":  I loved Bruce Springsteen.  He was the first record I got as a birthday gift in elementary school.  We had tons of records when I was a kid, but this one was the first that was MINE.  I loved his voice and the stories of his songs.  I loved "Born in the U.S.A." for the butt shot (it was on the album cover too!) and "Glory Days" for the kick-ass opening.  So good!

George Michael - "Freedom! '90" or "Faith":  "Freedom! '90" was just awesome.  Let's all just agree on that one.  The supermodels!  The amazing arrangement!  It rocked!  "Faith" is a personal favorite because I remember taping this song off the radio to learn all the words.  My cousin and I choreographed our own dance to this song and I loved George's voice.

MC Hammer - "U Can't Touch This":  Hi, this man can dance!  I loved this song and video for all of its cheesy glory.

Put any Madonna video here.  The Queen of all music videos.  There, I said it.

Prince - "Kiss":  He's provocative.  He has that falsetto.  I just love this song.

Sir Mix-a-Lot - "Baby Got Back":  Oh, Sir Mix-a-Lot.  I love this song.  It is so wrong on so many levels, but it is so, so right.  He dances on top of a big butt!  Also, I it makes me happy that he appreciates large buns.

I could seriously go on and on.  Poison, U2, Cyndi Lauper...the possibilities are endless.  Ah, the heyday of MTV surely was amazing.  The VJs, the anticipation of new videos and the countdowns.  I do miss that.

I should also mention that I still love MTV.  It may not play music anymore, but they have some fantastic programming.  Catfish: The TV Show is my new favorite.  I find it fascinating.  I also love any The Real World or Gauntlet or Duel (or any competition show where the characters act like idiots and compete in insane events).  I also love their True Life series -- I have learned a lot from that show and I have been shocked by that show.  You have to love that!  I appreciate the mindless entertainment of it and appreciate that MTV is still trying for some good programming.