Lost in Seattle

I’m reading The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank, the author of A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I have a sneaking suspicion that the book is considered “Chick Lit,” so I’m hiding it behind a copy of Maxim magazine when I’m on the bus.

In today’s passage, a junior high school character is thumbing through a worn copy of her elementary school yearbook. The girl is described by the narrator as the leader of a gang of bully girls. Now, however, the other girls in her gang have turned their attentions to boys and being pretty, and their former leader is feeling left behind. The now-pathetic girl clings to the yearbook, and her out-of-style friendship bracelets, as a reminder of her former glory.

I rarely hold onto things purely out of nostalgia, though I do to wax about the past (especially on this blog). I’ve moved far too many times in my life, and usually into smaller places, and have learned to not shed too many tears on my way back from the Goodwill donation box.

But there are some things that I’ve carried around from place to place, and I wonder what they say about me.

After Amy and I first moved in together and it seemed pretty likely that ours would be the last stop on our respective relationship trains, I threw away a box of old letters I had schlepped from place to place since leaving home. Many of the scraps and ephemera were love letters or cards from ex-girlfriends, but some were just old high school notes from friends. There were also a number of old journals of my own in there that were filled mostly with awful poetry and reflections on the ex-girlfriends and assorted crushes. I hadn’t looked at any of it in a decade or so, yet I ferried the sealed container from closet to closet, from Detroit to Iowa to Wisconsin. I have occasional regrets about dumping the lot of them — especially since some of the poetry would make for hilarious blog posts — but by-and-large I don’t feel the need to relive or reflect on the parts of my life captured in all that paper.

I still, however, have a crate of old records and most of my books from graduate school. Over the years, I have purged cassette tapes, CD’s, and novels, but for some reason the vinyl and the academic tomes remain.

The records aren’t worth much. Practically speaking, they are useless to me since I haven’t owned a turntable in years. Even the rarer ones — the Japanese edition of David Bowie’s “Diamond Dogs,” the green vinyl pressing of his reading “Peter of the Wolf” — are going for less than $10 on eBay. I probably can’t even recoup what their collective weight has cost me over the years in moving expenses.

The books are even more worthless, not only because their contents are mostly vacuous, but they are also heavily highlighted and covered with marginalia. I’d like to think that my profound thoughts on postmodernism and cinema would make them more valuable, but I know that any used book seller would reject them.

I have this vague notion that I’m going to dust off the academics again as an independent scholar, or something. I know this isn’t true, or, if it is, my scholarship would likely be something other than film studies. And yet the thought of tossing out two shelf-fulls of books brings on a slight feeling of panic.

Likewise the albums, but in that case it’s more of an investment issue. I’ve heard too many stories of people who threw out their old toys or seemingly-worthless this-or-that only to learn years later that some collector is basking on a beach in the Caribbean on the money he earned from finding the discarded object at a garage sale. But, honestly, are old, far-from-mint-condition records ever going to be worth anything?

Oh, and then there’s Chipmunk. I’m never getting rid of Chippie.