Flashback 1984: "Traveling where monsters dwell"

    A photocopy of this column has been floating around my office — on the desk, the floor — for a while now, having slipped out of some file at some point. It ran in the Wheaton Daily Journal in 1984. Reading it now, I'm struck by how consistent my voice is — I sound the same at 24 as I do at 63. That's good, I think. I like this writer's short, punchy sentences — I grew verbose over time — and am saddened by how nostalgic and backward-looking I was, even as a young man. But if I've learned one thing in the ensuing decades, it's that you have to be who you are. For good and ill.

     It was cold. I stood in the garage sifting through musty cardboard boxes, wishing the house had burned down. That great natural catastrophes had swept it away in a wall of mud and water and thunder. Anything to prevent me from having to go through this.

     My parents needed room to live. Finally, after much procrastination, they got down to ferreting my possessions out of the attic, down from high shelves, under beds, and the bottoms of closets — from all the places I had squirreled them away over the years. Go through them and take what you want, they said, we'll throw away the rest. I was home visiting for Thanksgiving, and put off the task until the night before I left to return to Chicago. I didn't know what was in store.

    I had saved everything. Why I don't know. Years and years of notes and letters and clippings and toys, packed into boxes, shoved into bags. I sifted through the papers, forlorn. I knew I should just pitch everything. boldy forge ahead. There are those who face the future, and those who face the past, and everybody knows which group is best.

     But I couldn't. It was as if a gang of former selves came trudging out of the frozen, lost past to confront me. It would be cowardly not to face them.

     Some 10 year old had filled a box with comic books. Captain America. Iron Man. The Avengers. Their vivid stories  had somehow slept, untouched, in my brain. I did not have to open up the cover to know how the X-Men defeated the Juggernaut. It was all there. I examined a comic called "Where Monsters Dwell." a huge thing, seemingly made of rock, chased a group of wild-eyed bystanders. "It's Rommbu! I'm trapped! There's no place to hide!!!" someone screamed. I knew the feeling.

     I had to take off my gloves to sort the stuff and my fingers quickly became numb. I dragged a box inside the house and opened it— class notes form the seventh grade. In another, I found baseball cards I hadn't looked at in a decade. Some 12 year old had catalogued the cards like a librarian, bundling them by year, by series, by team. Some were in numerical order, each card carefully checked off a list on top of the stack. as if they were the most vital thing in the world.

     I flipped through the cards, the rubber bands crumbling apart in my hands. A glimmer of former awe returned to me. A 1962 Maury Wills, the year he broke Ty Cobb's record. A 1959 Jimmy Piersall. A Gil Hodges from 1955, the year Topps made their cards to resemble that amazing device, television.

     I put the box aside to take with me, along with the comics. It was easy to save things with monetary value. Not so with those of different value. Some pimply teenager had been in love with a girl. Not only did he save letters and photographs, but notes passed in class. The pine needles from a Christmas tree. Napkins from a prom. One box was filled with hundreds of letters.

     I pulled out a letter at random and read it. It was like reading a poster for a long forgotten cause, the Wobblies or Free Silver. She signed it, "I love you forever & ever."

    What are you supposed to do with stuff like that? I honestly didn't know.

     I opened a clothbound book and became absorbed in a journal entry from 1973. I looked up, startled to be back in 1984. It was as if someone had tapped me on the shoulder, but when I looked up, nobody was there.

     The hard part of relics is they force juxtaposition. You look at the strong emotions that tore you apart as a youth: the burning love, the arching fear, the shimmering wonder. Everything was a Big Deal. Then contrast them with the beige and meager sentiments used to get through the day. The mild excitement that occasionally wells up in work. The measured, almost economic understandings negotiated between adults. It isn't necessarily an improvement.

     I packed the trunk of my car with boxes of memorability, feeling the shame of those who overindulge emotional whims. I didn't know what else to do. To throw it all away would have seemed to deny the past — looking everything over, sifting through the objects provoked so many thoughts and memories that otherwise would have remained dormant. Disposing of them would be like getting a partial lobotomy. It would all be lost.

     But keeping them felt like wallowing, abandoning the uncertain present for the hazy mist of past times. What kind of man keeps his baseball card collection in his closet? Who has huge bundles of letters from his first girlfriend? How many stuffed toys should a person have? It borders on the psychotic.

     The only compromise seemed to keep it, but out of sight. I drove home with the boxes, and moved them from my car to the basement. They'd be safe there, like a cardboard auxiliary memory. I don't know what kind of purpose they could possibly serve, except to be hauled from one home to another, being pruned down before each move. Growing at other times as more of life's flotsam and jetsum are deemed valuable enough to keep, but unnecessary to have close at hand.

     As I loaded them away, I felt like the last adherent to a forgotten religion, dutifully performing ancient rites. The High Priest of Dead Times and Eternal Regret, chanting garbled canticles of the past.