The Boxes

In 1998, when I was eighteen, I packed a whole bunch of my crap into boxes and moved them to my first apartment. When I got there, I only unpacked things as I needed them clothes and sundries mostly. I never got around to unpacking a large number of the boxes because they contained books and games I had amassed during my tenure at high school, and seeing as how I was going to start my freshmen year at Purdue university, I figured that there were bold new types of fun to be had. And that thought turned out to be prophetic; before I knew it, it was time to pack up my cloths and unpacked boxes and move to another apartment. This kept up for years, simply moving sealed boxes from dwelling to dwelling until enough time had gone by that I had forgotten what was in them completely.

Now those boxes are sat in a corner of a garage that has never housed my car. I open those boxes, one at a time and never more often than once a month, and go through what is essentially a time capsule to the person I was. Sometimes the find is solid gold, for example the time I cam across the box that had old drawings covering a handful of CDs still in the case. These discs dated back to my early introduction to ska music when it was a branching of the street punk scene and I wasted no time ripping them to my zune. The power chord guitar and trumpets where the soundtrack to my summers, and immediately brought back a flood of memories of late night coffee outings to the truck stop, of operating a caged tractor at a driving range whilst taunting the golfers, and generally running about with my collection of artful dodgers and ne’er-do-wells.

Sometimes the finds where more sobering, such as a velveteen bag filled with ten sided dice. When I cam across that particular box, the one with a lot of tabletop role playing gear in it, I couldn’t remember a single play session. All I could think of is “my god, how did I ever get a woman to kiss me in high school?” I felt like calling each and every one of them and thanking them for their acts of charity.

But more than anything else it is interesting to see what I thought merited saving. I am a packrat by nature and cannot bring myself to throw anything away, thus I have boxes of notebooks from my various subjects and in the margins are quips and observations I would write to myself. I have found a shoebox of old notes from girlfriends. I found old ribbons and awards. I found a picture of me and some friends I haven’t thought of in years. All these things come together to form a picture of the kind of person I was during my salad days, and the picture that emerges is a gangly, loud, nerdish, kid with more bravado than he had a right to.

If I met the eighteen year old version of me, I think we would be friends.