you are not what you own

as part of the big purge, I find myself finally being forced to look through the boxes of all my kid crap that my mom saved: report cards, trophies, old toys and other stuff she'd been quietly tucking away for years. a few years ago, when she was downsizing from house to condo, she dumped it all on me. three boxes of assorted childhood detritus; memories she thought I'd want to re-live when I was in my late twenties.

I started going through it, box by box, with the idea that it all had to go. who needs a soccer trophy from when they were seven? my new rule is: if I want to keep it, it should be out somewhere. if it's in a box and that's its permanent home, it's outtie. but I found myself having a hard time getting rid of a lot of it. quandary. then I hit upon a brilliant plan. in this age of digital ease, my answer was at my fingertips: take pictures of everything I wanted to remember, then toss the actual items. my own personal memento, only with a slightly longer time-frame.

so here you get a few choice items, their significance described as best I can remember.

pinewood derby car. 1986. I painted it silver because my dad had an old '67 e-type jag that was the same color. as a foreshadow of things to come, I won first prize for "engineering" (whatever the hell that means to a eight-year-old cub scout).

bazooka joe stamp block. art class, 1993. the art teacher was cool enough to let us play music on the stereo. my friend jake and i would sit in the back of the class near the cd player listening to my life with the thrill kill kult sing "sex on wheels." ah, high school. i also made a dead kennedys stamp, but that one is long gone.

fish in space painting. same art class. yeah, my esteemed painting career began and ended here. i think i was inspired by "pigs in space" from the muppet show and was seriously eating too much sugar at the time.

detroit tigers and return of the jedi pins. circa-1985. i can't remember where I got these, but I've been a tigers fan for a long time. bless them boys. (note a bit of the garter from my date to junior prom. the funny thing being that it meant absolutely nothing to get it--everyone's date gave them one. did other schools do this, or were we secluded, semi-rural freaks? maybe it's a thumb of michigan thing. I know brian had them, too.)

football weekly award. 1994. I'll leave it to you to determine what the "hustler of the week" was. but I won the award three times in a row. slut.

wooden canoe from the phillipines. 1985ish. my family stopped there for a few days during a big vacation trip. still, my mental image of the phillipines is traveling by canoe through the jungle to see waterfalls. somehow I think I have a skewed vision of what it's really like.

boy scout group photo. mackinac island, 1992(?). this is just a cropped version to protect guilty parties, but notice the middle finger. yeah, brian's gonna kick my ass for posting this. he's still pissed because I said I'd flip off the camera, too.

and now it's all in the landfill. so it goes. i wish i could post some of the stories i wrote in the third grade about the million dollar flying car and what i would do if i ran the zoo, but i think the context is lost unless you can see them written in that barely legible childhood scrawl.