A souvenir glass from a Brickskeller beer tasting, German Doppelbocks, the same night America bombed Iraq. Operation Desert Storm, they called it, but I didn’t know this until the morning paper arrived. Still wet from my shower as I primped to head out for the night, I saw on TV that the attack had started. I called Joe. “Hey, are you still going?” The next morning at work, our receptionist almost shouted into the phone: “No mom, don’t cancel your dentist appointment. You can’t stop living your life.” War was new to us then.
A forgotten spring, oversized and painted black, rust shows through. Unique, therefore special. A remnant of a sleeper sofa? A murphy bed? A worthless treasure like my wooden dice from Williamsburg, my commemorative aluminum coins from the Munich Olympics, or my hacky sack from college. Those things I never threw away, I should have thrown away, now I can’t throw them away.
A pair of silent movies on eight-millimeter film—the Keystone Cops and Laurel and Hardy. I watched them with my dad’s dinosaur projector, already an antique when I was born. We watched family home movies as well, projected on the wall above the mantel, forwards and then backwards. Our day at Great Falls scrambling rocks; our trip to the New Hampshire where I threw a snowball at my father with the camera running; endless tricycle circles around the flat part of our Connecticut driveway. My brother paid to transfer these movies to VHS in the nineties. That tape is as unwatchable today as the films were when he transferred them.
A cookie tin filled with buffalo nickels, a gift from my grandmother. Her addition to my aspiring coin collection, started in envy of a friend’s. Ghost buffalos so worn down they appear transparent. All the dates rubbed away. “Now you can go sell them or whatever it is you do,” she said. As it turns out, coins without dates are worthless.
A Washinton Senators baseball received at the gate on Baseball Giveaway Day. Mine tucked safely, for years, in a bureau drawer and ultimately this box. My brother autographed his with his own name. I always wondered if he regretted that.
The punk rock lapel pins that once adorned my leather jacket—Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Commander Salamander, Gumby. My father drove me over the DC line to the headshop where I bought that jacket to make sure I didn’t get taken (his word). The register guy, scraggly and missing an eye, but probably only in my memory, said with a straight face “It’s a little big, but you’ll want some extra room for a sweater under there when you’re riding your motorcycle.” Three years later, that coat saved my skin when I tumbled off my skateboard bombing down a hill.
Winnie-the-Pooh, matted, stained, misshapen from decades crammed in a box with my other crap: a pewter mug engraved with my name, scratched out and rewritten with a slur; suit buttons marked with my college logo, never sewn on a coat—an incomplete gift from my parents; the dude-beads I wore when I got my first tattoo, living on a high, when anything was possible; the framed photo of me finishing the Army 10-Miler, the fastest pace I ever ran anything; the metal wings I traded for with a biker a few minutes before a fight cleared out the bar for the night; a ceramic beer stein from the Red Garter, the strip joint where Brian and I ended our Fells Point bar crawls—everyone, including the dancers, forty years our senior.
After all these decades, Winnie-the-Pooh still wears a serene smile. My smile faded a moment after I opened the box. It’s hard to imagine why I decided to keep most of this junk.
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Written to the prompt “A forgotten spring…” and inspired by Georgia Kreiger’s Put the Person on the Page with a Collage Essay.
Previously Published on jefftcann.com
image courtesy of author