Thanks for the Memories

[ornoth]

Eighteen years ago, in one of my more sentimental moments, I blogged this:

This is what it's like to grow old.

I've lived my life thinking: while I'm young, I'll live it up. That way I'll have a huge collection of wonderful memories to relive when I get old, and can't do all those fun things anymore.

I guess I'm over the crest of that proverbial hill, because when I look back, I'm filled with hundreds upon hundreds of memories of my life.

I see now why old people feel isolated. It's not because they're alone; it's because they've lived an amazing, deeply touching novel that no one else will ever read.

So many people and places and events have touched my life, but no person will ever share the things I remember, the things that even today bring up deep feelings that toss me around like a toy boat toy boat toy boat.

Nearly two decades of life experience later, that image – of one’s life being a rich and meaningful story that no one else can ever fully appreciate – remains a powerful truth. That’s doubly so because most of our lives only persist within our own memories, locked within a single mind with no effective way to share them.

Don't Look Yet!

But all is not entirely lost. For many of us there are, in fact, a few precious, long-buried and boxed-up artifacts from those distant times. Fragments of the past that can be seen and touched, perhaps even photographed and shared.

So partly to share them with those of you who care, and partly just to honor the sacred memories of my life, today I begin what will probably be a long and ongoing new project: digging up and posting about some of the more interesting memorabilia that I’ve collected over six decades of living, laughing, loving, and adventuring.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey back through the times of my life. Maybe some of you will even see an item you recognize from our shared past. That would be delightful!

My plan is to share one item at a time, posting regularly, maybe once or twice a week. Photos will be accompanied by a brief writeup. Everything will be tagged “memorabilia”, and I’ve added a link to that growing collection of posts in my blog’s sidebar.

But the journey has already begun, in some sense. There are a handful of artifacts that I’ve already highlighted in past blogposts. So along with this introduction, I’ll begin by linking to those.

In vaguely descending order of their age, here are:

• Most of my professional business cards
• Several of my ID and driver’s license photos
• That time I ported my insult-generating computer program onto my cell phone, with speech synthesis
• My photo appearing on the cover of my art school’s brochure
• A friend’s painting that used to hang over the Sapient Corp. reception desk
• A newspaper article about a dumptruck tipping over backward on Liscomb Street in Worcester MA, which I found while interviewing at MediQual, my first post-college employer
• My collegiate mainframe assembler language textbook
• A fake Neal Peart $20 bill dumped on the crowd during Rush’s appearance in Portland, ME on their “Power Windows” tour
• PDF copies of the two-issue literary journal I edited for the Tolkien fandom group I founded as a high schooler
• A cassette of a song someone wrote for the same Tolkien fandom group
• Some odd items my mother left after her passing, including the surgical forceps she used as cooking tongs and one of the cutest family photos we have
• A poem typed on a recipe card by my mother, anticipating her death
• One of my typically offbeat childhood creative projects saved by my family

I’ll leave you with those for now, but you can look forward to lots more, as I begin this new series of postings. I’m certain I’ll enjoy it, and I hope you do, as well.