Sometimes

Sometimes I feel... I don't know if nostalgic is the right word.

I think it may be born in loneliness?

Did you know starting a new job is lonely?  Both lonely and for the introverted, frighteningly not-lonely.  Lonely because you don't know your place, and you don't know these people, so even if they are actively trying to include you, there is no familiarity or trust.  So energy-draining.

I think when I'm in this mental space, I have a tendency to look back on those who have been important in my life and miss them.  Or maybe not miss them, but miss that sense of what we had.  Or maybe sometimes not even miss what we had.  Maybe just sort of wonder at it.  Like wow, that happened.  That happened so long ago - was it really real?

I have a tendency to lose people.  I think it is because I am not a reacher-outer.  There are some who have passed out of my life who were vitally important in making me who I am today.

Sometimes when I'm in this place, I think of them and I wonder: do they think of me?  Did I impact them as they did me?

Whatever Happened to My Lunchbox?

Whatever happened to my lunchbox?

When came the day 

That it got thrown away?

And don't you think I should have had some say

In that decision?

--John Mayer 

One of the things I did while on vacation was sort through (some of) a giant stack of boxes of my childhood that my loving parents delivered recently.

There was all kinds of crazy crap in there: my cast from when I broke my arm in 5th grade, my first earring (one of two), music, books, and a boatload of china dolls.

Preston and I were talking and it seems like every kid has something that they collect.  Both of us hoped our collections would be worth something some day... he collected comic books, and I collected china dolls.  I had a ton, and some of them were really beautiful.  I never played with them, because they were a collection - they lived up on a high shelf that ran the length of my room, to be looked at but rarely touched.  (My rules/choice, not my parents'.)

Anyways, when I left for college, a large part of my old room was still intact, including the dolls.  When my parents sold that house, they packed it all up and moved it to the barn at the farm.  And now it is migrating back into my life.

It's a funny thing that happens to you when you go through stuff like that.  There is always a pervading, "Gosh, we saved a lot of JUNK!"  Which is always followed (in my head) with a, "I wonder how much money I could have now if I hadn't wasted all of it!"  But then you react emotionally to things, too.  Saving that cast.  Saving a bundle of letters that my parents/grandparents/friends sent to me at band camp one year - it's like a snapshot in time!  Cried over my Granny's letters and saved ALL of them.  But the most surprising thing to me was my indignation at how my parents stored those dolls.  It looked like they had just tossed them into boxes, then they didn't even tape the boxes up to keep out stuff, then when they stored them in the barn they got spiders, RATS, etc all up in them.

I am grateful that my parents love me enough to have saved so many artifacts from my childhood.  Sometimes I wish they hadn't when I am struggling with an emotional attachment that is preventing me from throwing away an item that I had completely forgotten the existence of until I opened a dirty box.  Or when my hamstrings are still sore A WEEK LATER from bending over to open/try to vacuum all the crud off the dolls...  Or when they boxed them up with such a lack of care that I have to see my once-prized possessions in the middle of a rat's next made from their stuffing - that's just not how I want to remember them.

Righteous indignation: wandering around grumbling that I'll never do that to the Z.  (Ha, we'll see.)

Memories

I have a 5 day weekend this week.

I decided to use some of my time productively by going through the 12 or so boxes that my parents have brought down on their past several visits. They've been sitting along the wall in my living room for months.

When I was growing up, every year my mom would put a cardboard box in the second closet in the middle bedroom, which we used as an office. That closet always smelled like mothballs. In addition to the box, it held the winter coats for most of the year, and at the top my Dad's extensive collection of back issues of Playboy. The trapdoor to get into the crawlspace under the house was under my box.

Mom would label the box with the year and whatever grade I was in, and every week when I bought home my "Tuesday Envelope" with all my work in it, she'd put it all into the box. Some years needed two boxes. As I got older, the box became more like a locker dump once a year, or once a semester, but there was still always a box.

Now my parents are trying to clean out their house, their attic, their barn, and my Mom is passing along my memories to me. I mostly wish that she had just saved a representative sample, but sometimes I am grateful that everything went into the box.

I found a note from my Dad on a post-it. My Dad worked in a factory on rotating shifts. 2 weeks day, 2 weeks evening, 2 weeks night. On evening shift we didn't see him at all. On night shift we only saw him as he was leaving. It was clearly during an evening shift time, and he apologized for being there for something... I've already forgotten the details, but it went into the one box of amalgamated stuff that I'm still going to save, this proof of how difficult it sometimes was to have a Dad that wasn't always there, for both of us.

There are cards for my birthdays from my grandparents who are gone. Saved.

There are notes from my friends. Saved.

There are good tests and bad tests. Some of each: saved. I started sucking in math around 6th grade, and I saved proof.

I saved a bit of homework from 5th grade that was clearly written with my left hand while my right arm was in a cast. From that year I also saved a doodle in which I said I hated myself. Proof that my tendency towards depression has been with me for a very long time.

I saved the printout of the Presidential Physical Fitness challenge results, also from 5th grade. I was 4'8", weighed 70 lbs, and failed the one mile run test, running it is 13 minutes 47 seconds. I saved that one to prove how far I've come.

Mom also brought some boxes of my grandparents' stuff that has been stored out in the shed. I pulled this beat up, scratched up, old, blue tin out of a box, wondering if Mom really thought I wanted this. I opened the tin, and the smell of Granny's house drifted up. It was filled with mostly sewing stuff, so I knew why Mom thought I'd want it. But you know what else I found? Granny's Weight Watcher's card from 1981, the year I was born. Her goal weight was 150 pounds (she was 5'9"), and her weight went up and down like a yoyo. I saved that card as proof that some battles are hereditary.

I still can't run. I have another doctor's appointment tomorrow. I am trying to take this time to become a better swimmer, refocus on my diet, do core and upper body strength work, so that when I can run again, my cardiovascular fitness will not have suffered, and hopefully I can come back even stronger than before. But let's face it: not running is driving me crazy.