Excavating my past lives

Do I really want to write about this?

Early evidence that I thought a drawing added a certain something to an assignment. This would have been about 1975? 76? This is obvious if you check out the curly perm and the short, tight shorts. I’ve indicated ‘illegal’ not because I had a premonition that 70s fashion choices should have been illegal, but because the runners, socks, and shorts were not the approved colours of our gym strip. The lack of knees is entertaining. I suppose I was focussing on the over-pointy elbow…

One by one, I’ve been pulling boxes out of the back of a shipping container, clearing out the detritus I think my offspring would rather not have to deal with after my demise. Yes, I seem to be doing some Swedish death cleaning.

Today’s box is a true jumble of some of my very earliest stories, selections written while I was still in elementary, middle, and high school. One of my first published pieces (it ran in the high school newspaper) was about a boy who had no immune system and wanted, more than anything, to touch a leaf (it was fall, the leaves were changing colour, he was trapped inside and unable to do anything but watch the world beyond his window change seasons without him). The Last Leaf was, of course, the first and last leaf he encountered. He, like most of my characters, died.

The writing is so uniformly dark, I’m surprised there were no phone calls to my parents suggesting therapy might be a good idea. One dystopian fantasy written when I was about twelve (18 Silent Children) follows a poor guy who, along with some zombie-like kids, are part of some weird experiment in which the ‘observers’ find ways to make the ‘subjects’ do increasingly awful, violent things to each other. In the end, all the kids turn on the ‘visitor’, and tear him limb from limb. [I’ll upload an image, an excerpt from the gory story… if you are at all squeamish, don’t read it.]

There’s a letter I received when I was about ten from a prisoner incarcerated in a US penitentiary. He had been pranked by fellow inmates who gave him my mailing address after finding it in the Penpals Wanted section of a horse magazine. My mother was furious and called the prison to tell the warden off. Then she turned her attention to me, scolding me soundly for being so stupid as to have put my contact information out into the world. Oh, what would she have thought of the perils of social media?

An IOU to my first husband (I would have been 19? 20?) promises a dozen spicy sexual favours and is followed by a grovelling apology for being too busy to pay him much attention. After I had stopped blushing at how forthright I had been with my hanky-panky punch card, I realized this item (preserved for who knows what reason) was a weirdly prescient message to my future self. If I had a dollar for every time someone has suggested I might be just a little too busy being busy to focus on the people closest to me, well… I’d be writing this newsletter from my private yacht.

There are letters to and from the friends and family who stuck with me despite my scheduling challenges, angsty teen poetry, and a couple of mostly-finished plays (one is about an undergrad student who begins an anonymous correspondence with a female professor during which she declares her adoration but not her gender and arranges to meet said professor at a secret location with the hope of convincing the professor that love transcends social conventions and gender boundaries…)

Another play (Do the Dishes, Mother - I’m Pregnant), was intended for production at a high school drama festival. It features a completely dysfunctional family talking in circles around each other, holding forth, revealing secrets (including the teenage daughter confessing to being pregnant), but never actually hearing what anyone else has to say. I had just encountered Harold Pinter and was writing under his influence - though the end result is mostly garbled and was pulled from the performance roster at the festival for reasons I was never told.

There are songs - baleful laments about unrequited love and the meaning of life - the normal stuff you’d expect to hear drifting up through the heating vents in the floor after a 14-year-old had been given a guitar and taught herself to play three chords.

Maybe this time
Love is here to stay
Maybe this time
It will never go away
Or maybe this time
it will all be gone tomorrow…. [sung with a long, drawn-out ohhhhh at the end of tomorrooooooow - a bit like a howl of grief. Funny thing was, I hadn’t experienced anything quite that intense at that point, though I would have reason to think about that song a number of times in the years I had yet to experience…]

A dream journal contains a handful of dreams captured over the course of about 14 years. There are plenty of blank pages left in the book. I’ll leave that by my bed and see what may burble up out of my subconscious depths. (UPDATE the following morning: Not much, apparently - all I have today are dream fragments, most of which involve modes of transport - a bicycle in one, a train, and in a another, a strange centrifugal force carnival ride contraption designed to carry passengers into space).

These two items came into my possession more than 30 years apart - and yet, they somehow wound up in the same box labelled ‘Store. Sort.’ It requires more brain and emotional power than I had anticipated to wade through so many years of so much paper…

There are a few books including a copy of the lovely book The Hugo Movie Companion that Dad and I bought together after watching (and thoroughly enjoying) the movie based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick (which we had both read and loved). The books are among the (relatively) few saved from what was once an overly extensive library - I’ll need to consider carefully why they were saved during that harsh cull and whether I need to hang onto any of them now. (I do love that Hugo movie companion).

A handsome plaque from 2006 declares that I won the Monday Magazine Award for Victoria’s Favourite Children’s Author. I’ll hang onto that for now - it reminds me I was once a very busy children’s author, as does the event poster from 2001 that includes a number of photos of me waving my arms around in front of a group of kids at a school library.

My idea of a good outfit in which to do a public appearance of any kind is entertaining, as is the oversized prop I lugged around, a poster-board-sized display ‘book’ that included enlarged photocopy images of all the steps involved in the production of an actual book. I did a lot of touring with that thing before laptops and projectors allowed me to make the switch to PowerPoint presentations as a much more efficient way to share visual aids.

Time Magazine’s Great Events of the 20th Century wall calendar from 1999 is empty of any entries or notations but includes some fabulous photographs, potential fodder for an art journal or collage piece? Collage might be an excellent use of my collection of trading cards of all the members of the 2007 RCMP Musical Ride squad. Flip each rider’s card over and you get a micro bio of the officer and his or her horse (in both official languages). This set is both useless and way cool. Such items are the hardest to know what to do with. The connection to my writing life was a fabulous trip I made to Ottawa to research a book about the Musical Ride, a book which, alas, was never published. (I should take another look at that project - I still have all my research notes, photos, and several drafts of different versions of a Musical Ride story…) Right. I’m keeping the cards in a tote roughly labelled, “Writing Projects to Revisit.”

And so the digging goes. I’m reluctant to throw everything out as I still haven’t finished writing the book about my farm, or my parents’ stories, or my most personal memoir (working title: The Box of Broken Hearts, it’s based on various failed love affairs and may need to wait until a few more people have died before I get down to serious work thereon). Even if I decide to fictionalize some/all of that, the raw material is nevertheless handy as it will remind me that all good protagonists need to be fatally flawed and the people who caused me the most grief were/are only human. Unfortunately, both the contents of the actual heartbreak box (yeah, there is one - and not just a shoebox, either), the farm documentation, the journals, letters, clippings, and looseleaf sheets of the earliest writing are too voluminous to be digitized in the time I have available on this trip, but may be interesting enough to analyze properly one day when I take the time to sum up what all this writing/living over so many years might actually have meant.

Sigh. Any one of these objects/bits of paper/notebooks/letters I’ve unearthed could have been the starting point for a whole post. But if I were to stop that long and write that much, I would never get to the bottom of the box. And there are many boxes…

What’s lurking in your boxes and bins that you can’t quite get rid of but may never actually look at again?