My parents have been mailing me boxes of my stuff from high school and college on and off for almost a year now; they moved back to Connecticut in June 2010 and, though they now have a huge basement, still (understandably) would like me to take possession of that which is mine. So. Boxes.
I have unearthed some treasures: articles from Parade magazine on the "cyberspace" fight to save "My So-Called Life" from cancellation; a beloved cassette tape, "TV Hits Vol. II" from the Meadowbrook Pops Orchestra, featuring classic '80s shows (who doesn't want to listen to the theme song from "Murder, She Wrote" on demand?); and my first pair of glasses (huge frames!) But the overwhelming majority of space is filled with letters.
I attended the University of Virginia's Young Writers Workshop in Charlottesville in the summers of 1994 and 1995, and, in those early-email days, it was natural to write to new friends through the trusty U.S. Postal Service. I was 14 and 15 and prolific, and so were my friends from Pittsburgh; St. Petersburg, FL; Brookline, MA; Ridgewood, NJ; and beyond. We may have only spent 3 weeks together in the same space, but some of us wrote to one another for years.
I love those letters now, both for their often-quirky, handmade, collaged envelopes and for the high school obsessions detailed within, but it also makes me sad to read them. A lot hadn't happened yet in 1995, including the deaths of two close friends and three of my grandparents. I'm no longer in as frequent or meaningful of contact with any of those people: college, significant others, jobs and new friends intervened. And in many cases we've just grown apart.
I'm not sure what you call it when you keep lots of things, pages and pages, that you can't bear to look at for very long, but that's what I'm doing. I'm an archivist, and I want to be able to remember Bug and Chris and Emily and Dave and everyone else, as they were.
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