Pack-rat or Archivist? You decide

So... my mother is receiving an award tonight from the Alzheimer's Association (I will be writing a blog later with the details from the program) and I flew home this week to go to the event. I'm so proud of her and everything she's done, but that's for a later post.

No, today's post is about my childhood desk. It sits on the wall of my childhood bedroom, below a faded yellow post-it note on my wall that says (in all caps and underlined, no doubt for emphasis) "STUDY!" The note is a relic of my long-ago days of school-dom. I asked my mother yesterday how it can still be on the wall. They stripped the wallpaper since I moved out and painted the room white. She says she liked to leave it there because it was so iconoclastic.

Anyway, I was getting dressed yesterday and happened to glance over at my desk and noticed a little round piece of plastic sitting there. I realized it was one of those plastic discs that you put in the center of a 45 record to play it on a normal record player. As I was looking at the little disc of yester-year, suddenly, as though I had blinders on before, my entire desk and everything sitting on it (including the yellow post-it reminder to study) materialized. I realized that since I moved out of this house in 1991, I have never really looked at that desk. So, I decided to dig in and discover it's contents. Here's what I found...

On top of the desk:

• A jar full of pennies in a mug that says "Please don't bother me, I'm studying." (Yeah, I'm sure...)
• 8 different coffee mugs with various sayings... "Official Left-Handed Mug" (which had a small hole on one side so if you tried to drink with your right hand it would dump the liquid all over you) "Coffee and Cruellers will hold back the honk" (That's a Wayne's World mug, of course) and one with a pretty unicorn leaping over a rainbow.
• A Giant Guinness mug filled with hair combs.
• Four, count them, FOUR pencil cups jammed full of writing implements (including some Crayola markers) which no longer have any hope of working. (And I know they don't work, cause I tried several of them as I began my inventory of the desk. None of them were up to the job. I just put them back, naturally.)
  
• A Guinness bottle with a red and white pom sticking out of it from my Shaker Heights Red Raiders days.

And that's just what's been sitting on top...

Drawer #1:

• A program from my high school senior honors dinner, in which I did not receive any honors.
• My report card from the fall of '92 (Mostly Bs with an A- in Fiction writing)
• A directory of my C:/ drive from my first computer
• A Colleco Quiz Wiz with 1001 questions (I wonder if I can get money for that from eBay)
• A container of Pick Up Sticks
• A File box that says "Pick a Book" on the outside. Inside are cards describing books. For example: "This book is about all kinds of animals at a hotel. It is very funny" and "This book is about a boy who loves soccer. If you like soccer, this book is for you." (For the record, I believe this box was a class project in Elementary School and I took it upon myself to procure it secretly. Not all these descriptions were written by me, as evidenced by the fact that there is a book about soocer.)

Drawer #2:

• Two boxes of reel to reel tape from my days as a radio Production Manager on 106-VIC- the Voice of Ithaca College.
• A notebook containing questions from my first (and last) celebrity interview... yes, friends, it was Julio Iglesias.
• A folder full of fiction writing, most of it involving death and bad metaphors. I was a very, very dark writer in my youth.
• A college Viewbook from the University of Hartford. (A school which I did not visit, nor apply to, nor, obviously, attend. However, I live on a street called Hartford now, so that's something.)
• A book in which I wrote down song lyrics I liked with the title in calligraphy (or what I believed calligraphy should look like) on the facing page. Many of the titles are Beatles songs, but there is some Simon & Garfunkel thrown in for good measure. (It seems to me this was early practice for my future career. It also seems to me that I got a lot of song lyrics wrong back then.)
• A reminder on a slip of paper to call Lee Fisher's office (candidate for State Representative) on Monday for myself and Molly. Mol and I volunteered in his office in 1990, mainly because the Volunteer Coordinator was very cute and used to call us Slut-Puppy. (Which we also called ourselves, to be fair.)
  
• A yellow Yo-Yo
• The letter I earned for my letter jacket from High School Marching Band. (Which I clearly had the sense NOT to put on my jacket, cause how lame is a band letter?)
• A book of piano sheet music with TV and Movie themes. (Ex: The Theme from Ice Castles, St. Elsewhere and Happy Days.)

Drawer #3

• A Certificate of Merit from Temple Emanu El for Outstanding Scholastic Achievement in Grade 10 Judaic Studies. (Really? They must have set the bar VERY low...)
• A wall calendar from 1990 titled "PMS Attack." Complete with countdown to the day I left for my summer trip to Cambridge in England. The countdown begins 117 days from departure. (From 4/22-4/30, I wrote "Dante's 9th Level of Hell" across the dates. Which puzzled me until I saw that the SAT's were held on May 1st. Ah!!!)
• Paperback book version of the movie "Big" starring Tom Hanks.
• Flash cards for Division. (Truthfully, I should take those home and study them. I could use the practice!)
• The shooting script from the August 25, 1994 edition of Entertainment Tonight. John Tesh: "All that pushing and squeezing and pushing and squeezing and finally... rock hard thighs. Now watch Suzanne put them to work." (Ok, I'd really like to know what was happening in the tape package that came after THAT intro!)
• My Driver License that expired in June of '93
• My SISTER'S Driver License (which I was stupidly using as a fake ID even though there was a three inch height difference and we look nothing alike) which expired in January of '95.
• A recipe printed on dot matrix printer for Skyline Chili (hmmm.... can't wait to try that!)
• A copy of Cliff's Notes for Macbeth.

Now, you may be wondering to yourself, 'Self, I wonder if Sheri decided to throw out stupid things like the note to call Lee Fisher's office, or the printed 8 page description of a C:/ drive that has been taking up space in a landfill for a good 15 years... and really get something accomplished while she strolled down memory lane.' So, I'll tell you.

No.

No, when I was done looking at everything, writing it all down so I could record it here, I shoved it all back in the drawers and pushed and pushed until they closed again.

And it's not that the idea of purging the drawers and throwing things out didn't occur to me. It did. Many times. However, ultimately, the garbage bags were downstairs and the alarm was already on. And, you know, I had such a good time combing through all this crap, that who am I to deny my future self the same enjoyment 10 years from now? When I can again wonder why I'm saving that empty file box, or that yellow yo-yo, or the 15 copies of the resume I sent to LA when I was trying to find an internship for 2nd semester senior year. How sad would I feel one day to not be able to comb through pages and pages of badly written fiction with teacher's comments written in green on the side, pointing out gramatical and spelling errors?

No, I can't deny my future self this joy. And what if I should become famous? I know it's not likely, but it could happen. Shouldn't I save all these important momentos for the opening night of the Sheri Spitz Collection at the Smithsonian?

Yes, better to leave things as they are. Who knows what I will need someday.

Tune in for the next time I return home and document the contents of my closets, where I promise you, there is a Married With Children board game!