A rabbit hole in the basement

In addition to champagne and empty resolutions, the new year brings out the need for me to clean and organize. This year you can find me under layers of dust and grime, poking only my head out from stacks of boxes in the basement. It's become a bit of an obsession really (of course if you had seen it in it's previous state, you would understand.) I've been missing appointments, outright ignoring the children and allowing the rest of the house to become a bit of a nightmare.

In the height of my 'purge' mode yesterday (not to be confused with the stomach flu I had just gotten over...), I discovered a familiar bright blue file box labeled 'felecia'. I couldn't believe it - after years and years of rooting through multiple versions of Andy memorabilia, I have finally discovered an archive that indeed represents a part of my own childhood. I had to put myself in check when a little voice cynically reminded me that it could be full of meaningless junk. Regardless, I tore into the box like a kid hopped up on too many candy canes.

It was as if opening the lid literally jump started my long-term memory. All of the things I saw had been completely and totally forgotten up to this point. Man were there pictures; some I remembered and some I didn't. I found my John Glenn yearbook and there was a folder from a literature class in my junior year of high school. It was a lot of fun re-reading the poems and short stories; I would read one page and think 'not bad!' and then I would read another and think 'my poor teacher...' There were many birthday cards, a few time cards from a restaurant I used to work at and a few cassette tapes featuring Whitney Houston, Expose and even the sound track to Cocktail.

I dug into the small envelopes marked with the return address for JASON ZACHER... oh man alive... if I could only find a picture of this blonde haired 12-year old hunk of burnin love you would understand why I had the long long crush I did. He was a boy who I admired from afar - literally aFAR- because he lived about 4 hours away. For one week out of the year, I was granted the privilege of admiring his side profile at bible camp. (I honestly don't remember getting too serious about the Lord until the year he couldn't come to camp because of a soccer tournament!) Seriously folks, this was love. Finally, during the summer when I was 13, my older cousin Jamie got tired of what turned out to be mutual crushes. He pulled us out of the dining hall, and demanded we announce our love for one another. It was horribly embarrassing but alas, my long-time crush became my long-distance boyfriend. Initially, our letters were shy and short, but after a while we both wrote as the most platonic of friends. He would ask me for dating advice and I would tell him about Andy. We eventually lost touch, but it was a real trip finding these "love" and "not so love" notes.

I dug deeper into the box and spied a few spiral notebooks. I laughed like mad when I discovered what they were. You see, when I was about 11 years old, my best friend (eh hmm!) and I had come up with alter-egos, if you will, named BEVERLY & ZACH who were of course, super models. We would sit down with stacks of magazines, and clip out pictures of blondes (representing Zach) and brunettes (representing Beverly). As it turns out, we were extremely boy-crazy too because after pasting the pictures into our notebooks, we would write out comments and thought bubbles containing claims of love for whosoever our characters were pictured with. What can I say - it kept us out of the malls!

In an effort to prevent this post from taking you further down my memory's lane, let me just leave you with a suggestion to kick-start a flood of your own. Open an old yearbook, report card or diary and enjoy who you once were. I enjoy the life I have and the person I've become so there is something to be said for looking back from time to time just to catch a glimpse of who it was who got me here.