When I was a teenager, my house was the âparty houseâ or âhang-out house.â My house was the place everyone converged nearly every night of the week. In fact, it wasnât uncommon for my friends to be there, in my basement, which was where we hung out, without me even being home. Iâd wake up sometimes and find people in my basement. Iâd come home from work and find people in my basement. Iâd be having dinner with my family in our dining room, hear the side door open, and footsteps racing downstairs…several sets of footsteps. It was constant and not un-enjoyable. I really loved having my friends there all the time. Looking back on it, I have no idea how my parents tolerated anything about it. The noise, the responsibility. At forty, I canât imagine having my floors vibrate with the boisterous conversation of twenty excited teenagers at all times. I need to say that again…AT ALL TIMES.
Unfortunately, over the years, I lost touch with just about all of my high school friends because, well, life got in the way, which Iâve learned is a rather poor excuse for losing touch but not completely untrue. But due to (very sadly) a death in our friend group, Iâve made a resurgence in their lives and am glad Iâve done so. My life is better with them in it than without. However, despite my nearly twenty-year absence, the stories of my basement endured to the point where newcomers to our circle of friends who had never been in my basement know it. Thatâs called lasting power.
That basement and the house above it have been gone for many years now but, like all good and bad times, the memories remain. And many of which are stored in boxes, where? In my basement.
Recently, I decided to undertake the monumental task of organizing our storage room, which was starting to look like Fred Sanfordâs yard. Okay, not starting to look like but look exactly like (but I did know where everything was at).
This wasnât the first time I undertook this task, but it was the most advantageous attempt because I decided to whip the storage room into shape with a vow to never let it fall into uphevial again and build very durable and large shelving units to neatly store twenty years of what could only be called âstuff.â
It started on a whim, when I was downstairs playing with my son and decided to start organizing the Sun Dayâs old financial records. Since the Sun Day is approaching its ninth anniversary with the next edition, I realized I was a few years behind in disposing of those early records that have been needlessly occupying space in my life. Organizing those records turned into organizing our personal financial records, which went back a little farther than nine years, but I figured it was finally safe to dispose of my 1998 tax return, the whopping $1200 it was (I was 21).
Box by box, I sorted out forty years of my life and twenty years of my married life with the intention of doing so mercilessly, vowing that if I havenât opened a box in twenty years, there was nothing worth keeping in there and it was doomed for the curb. And while I did throw out or donate a large portion of these castoffs, I came across things that I just couldnât get rid of, like the old four-cup Mr. Coffee that was the first coffee maker my wife and I had when we moved in together.
Of course, much of this âstuffâ was more recent accruals and held no sentimental value (like a popped air mattress that inexplicably escaped being thrown out for ten years), while going through all these boxes, I came to realize something both simple and profound. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the items I held on to went from one box to another newer box without much discrimination and will stay in that box for another twenty years, never seeing the light of day, until another twenty years of stuff accumulates, and I go through the boxes againâa cycle that will continue until I die and my son is left to sort through all our old stuff and wonder, My gosh, why did my parents keep some of this junk? And to the curb or thrift store or recycling center it will go, him never knowing what memories things like that little ceramic frog held.
It also occurred to me that your mind is like a storage room. In fact, if you ever read or at least seen Stephen Kingâs Dream Catcher (the book is light years better), youâd know Mr. King made the same comparison with the character Jonesy, who spends the better part of the book trapped inside his own mind, which is a library of boxes…or a library of memories.
Itâs ironic to me now that so much of my life before now is stored in boxes in a basement, which is where much of formative years were spent, laughing and learning and fighting and building relationships with friends. You know what, Iâll end this here and let you draw the metaphors between boxes and basements and memories.
