Can We Talk 2

Time Passes By

         Today I was in the furnace room which is also storage. I got rid of some things, old parts to refrigerators, and so forth, while my Dad wasn't looking. But I found a shoe box inside another box, and I was shocked by what was in it.

         Whether I put it together years ago, or my mother collected them, I don't know. There were report cards from junior high, awards from church which had meaning for me, postcards, and so forth. I took a trip down Memory Lane. There was a faintly typed list on onion skin of names and addresses. It took a few reads for me to realize they were girls from my freshman dormitory. I don't remember making or receiving the list. (A sign of age.) There was a gross thing in a box under a folded sheet of paer. The sheet had the names of "donors" and they were high school chums. The gross thing was a mass of hair in different colors. Eww. One of the names is that of a guy who is a prominent doctor in town. There were some other things from college so I probably collected them with Mom's help. Who knows how the bow the box ended up there, neglected, unmarked.

         I wouldn't part with these things for any reason. That trip down the Lane almost left me in tears. Where have the decades gone? When I die, someone no doubt will throw these things away. They mean nothing to anyone. They have no historical or monetary value. But at the time they were important to me, to my mother. A lifetime has gone by and those tokens don't matter to anyone, except me in these rare moments. This is what our lives come to, a box of yellowed papers and forgotten trinkets.