Three Things From My Childhood

A story about how things matter.

Photographs can help you remember things, but objects make you feel things. The connection is not obvious as in a photo. You have to work a little bit to remember the significance and conjure up the memories.

As we get older we have an urge to clear out, actually it’s an urge to keep other people from doing it for us. But we need to be careful, every object we unload is not clutter or needless material acquisitions. Some are tied up in our identify and our remembrances…and those are terrible things to lose.

One Lost

I had a New York Mets cup when I was a boy. It was a coffee mug type of thing, Orange with a blue Mets logo. I was a huge Mets fan up until around 1990 or so when there was a second baseball strike. Having moved to a town that didn’t have a major league ball club, it took effort to keep up. When it became clear to me, as well as to many others, that fans were just not that important to either the players or the owners it was over for me. Yeah I still watch a ball game now and then, I still love a good double play or a relay from the outfield to the plate. But a lot of the fun has gone out of it.

Still…I loved that cup. I have a strange attachment to “things”. I think it’s because they tie me to warm memories of the past and the people that live in them. A shrink would probably tell you I have abandonment issues. I have seen a couple of shrinks in my day and it seems like a shrink thing. Anyway, the cup stayed with my mother when I moved to college, through my marriage and raising my child. It was like a small anchor whenever I went home. I could always find it in the cupboard. My mother, who knew it was important, made an effort to hang onto it even though she had divested many of her possessions before she passed. I remember the last time I saw her alive, at her apartment in upstate NY, many hours away from where I lived. I found the cup, opened a can of ginger ale, and drank it out of the cup. She had plenty of tumblers I could have used, but that was beside the point. The Mets cup meant home, and it made me feel at home. Home was a lot of places for me and so the cup, along with the table my mother refinished, her plaid set of dishes and so many other things were anchors. My mother and stepfather spent the last parts of their lives moving up and down the gorgeous Hudson Valley, and always there was the cup. Even when she had given away so many things important to her and important to me.

It remained.

After she passed, my Uncle and I decided to let her landlord sell her things and keep the proceeds. Her landlord was a kind woman. We went through my mother’s meager collection of things, and I took important papers, photographs, her wedding ring and my aunts high school ring.

But I forgot to take the Mets cup. Maybe it was part of letting go.

There is an identical one available on EBAY for nearly $200. That seems to be the going rate and this one is pristine. But that is just A cup. It is not THE cup, and so it carries no significance.

One Found

I still have my high schoool ring. Augusta Military Academy, Fort Defiance, Virginia. If that doesn’t sound like a place with substance and provenance I don’t know what does. The ring reflects that. Heavy and large, white gold with an aquamarine stone faceted inside and out…my initials engraved inside the band. It was a graduation present, so it should have been precious. I treated it carelessly during a life period where I treated lots of things (and people) carelessly. And so I lost track of it.

I didn’t forget it. Now and then I wondered what happened to it, and realizing that I had lost something so precious made me feel bad at a time when I had a lot of things to feel bad about. Just one more failure. Part of me thought I might uncover it before I made my next move. That move was coming up soon and there was no ring. Not that I was looking all that hard. Finding it would have been a win. I didn’t want a win.

It had been one of the strangest years of my life. Full of memories from friendships and the maniacal pace of theatrical performances we had pulled off that year. The shows and the late nights were never ending as was the deep depression and sense of hopelessness. I slept during the day and became a night person. When even my theatre chums had turned in, I was up walking around town or watching old movies in the lounge by the fireplace. WGN Chicago.

It was the last day in the dorm and we had to clear all of our stuff out, including the garbage furniture that students tend to accumulate in dorm rooms. The room was a bright spot: by any measure it was the best room in the dormotory, on a corner with lots of windows. My roommate had a great stereo and a large record collection. He was a music major with great taste and there was an unspoken agreement: I could listen to his records as long as I took good care of them and I wouldn’t rat him out for some of his extracurricular activities. The stereo and all the good stuff was gone and all that now remained was this old overstuffed recliner with springs sticking out and a hole in the cushion that we covered with a towel.

I hadn’t been thinking of the ring but something possessed me and I lifted the towel and beheld the small hole in the middle of the chair…ring sized. The odds were infinitesimal but it struck me that I should at least have a look…just to satisfy myself that I even looked in the crazy places (though I had hardly looked in the obvious places). I stuck my finger in the hole and to my amazement, there was the ring. There was my win whether I wanted it or not. I wish I could say it signified a turning point, but the self-imposed shitstorm continued apace. Still, it was hard not to feel good about it.

The ring is so big I rarely wear it but I know exactly where it is. Always.

One Constant

This one was tougher. I have a lot of things from my childhood but a number of them were in my mother’s custody for a long time. Airline silver from when she did food prep at JFK, a US Navy fork from the old Enterprise…probably filched by some sailor she dated during the war. A post card, and a bucket hat with my name embroidered on it from the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. I wanted something that had never been out of close proximity and something that signified. It came down to two things.

The first thing was a lanyard I had made at summer camp when I was around 10 or 11 years old. It’s one of those things all long term summer campers wind up making and they resonsonate because they are all unique to the maker in terms of the selected stitch and colors. Mine was a modified cobra stitch of my own design and was blue and red with a yellow belly and a big blue head with a little red tongue sticking out. Looking at it brings back a flood of warm memories of summers in Upstate New York along the Hudson River. It is special.

The second is a small magnetic chess set. Fully open it is about 10×10 inches. It is made of blonde finished wood with a black and white metal top that has a split in the middle so it could fold. When folded in half it stored all the plastic chess pieces with magnetic bottoms in the individual foam cutouts. It became a little 5×10 box with chess pieces on the inside. This has not left my possession since I was 11. My Aunt Barbara gave it to me when I first headed off to military school in 6th grade thinking it would come in handy. She also sent me books that were just enough above my grade level to keep me interested. The chess set reminds me of my aunt and I loved my aunt deeply. She is no longer with me but all around our house you can find little things she gifted to me over the years. But the chess set was first…and just like the woman who gave it to me it was cherished and loved.

My daughter has the chess set now, up in her room. It is displayed in a way that gives proper due to its significance. She can keep it as long as she wants, because in the end it is her’s anyway.

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