Category: Personal Relics

My sainted mother knew how to sew. She knew how to do needlepoint, crewel, embroidery, and other things. She even had a little business hosting Creative Circle parties, shilling and selling their craft kits.

But when it came time to tart up our Christmas stockings, she went with some green iron on letters she probably bought at the flea market on the hill above our trailer park.

They’ve faded on one side over the years as they hung on the paneling of the trailer or to the right of the sofa in the living room down the gravel road. She made one for my brother and one for herself, the three of us against the world. When I got to high school, we got into the habit of actually putting things in the stockings. It’s a tradition that continues to this day, as I fill my wife and children’s stockings with gift cards and candy and little gifts on Christmas Eve.

I’m not sure when I took possession of it, either. It might have been after my mother passed away. I’ve never hung it by a chimney with care, either; by the time I lived places with actual chimneys, my mother-in-law, who is more crafty than sewy, created some felt and bangled stockings for the whole family. So these are hung by our chimney with care to be filled on Christmas Eve.

So I hang the old stocking in my office, generally taping it onto the Arkanoid video game and rehanging it often as it peels off.

It’s not the only Christmas decoration that reminds me of my mother and my youth, but it does often as it falls to the floor again..

Christmas my eighth grade year, I received two things: A Commodore 128 home computer and a blanket. Guess which one I still have?

You could guess “Both” based upon my known proclivities for hoarding, but I sold the Commodore 128 after college when I needed a few bucks, although I did receive another over a decade ago from Triticale before he passed away.

I still have the blanket, which I named Rocky because I guess that made sense to eighth grade me. I think he is standing on some rocks, which you can no longer see because the darker brown threads of the blanket have washed out.

My brother, if I remember correctly, got a wolf blanket. My Aunt Dale was the first to get one of these catalog-ordered throw blankets, a tiger that she hung on her wall as a tapestry because she was into tigers.

I slept under that blanket in high school, at college, and probably right up until the time I got married and moved from a twin to a king bed. I probably used it as a throw blanket after that until I bought my current favorite St. Louis Blues throw blanket at an estate sale in Ladue almost twenty years ago.

I have another picture on the Web host of Rocky from 2010, and you can see how much he has faded since I took the photo in 2010.

I’m not sure what I was talking about in 2010 when I uploaded it, but a quick search didn’t come up with a post about it. Forgive me if I’m repeating myself eight years later.

We’ve stored Rocky with extra throw blankets in the hassock in our family room since we moved to Nogglestead, but my boys have discovered it and have started squirrelling it into their bedroom nests where they like to pile blankets and pillows to simulate a return to the womb every bedtime. So it’s likely that Rocky’s days are numbered. But I think the oldest, in seventh grade, likes that I’ve had it since I was in eighth grade. He might hold similar hopes for his collection of emoji pillows.

I’ll be sad when the time comes to recycle the blanket, sadder than the also increasingly worn St. Louis Blues blanket retires.

So I was listening to Pink Floyd, really loud, when I got to “Nobody Home”:

And I thought, “I’ve got a little black book with me poems in.” Continue reading “I’ve Got A Little Black Book With My Poems In” →

You don’t hear much about my father on this blog, mostly because my parents divorced when I was a lad and I ended up in Missouri with my mother and her family instead of Wisconsin. I don’t have many mementos from my father, as he remarried, so when he passed away, I didn’t receive any of his effects.

But before he passed away, even before my parents divorced, when I was a boy, he gave me his childhood baseball bat.

Continue reading “Personal Relics: My Father’s Bat” →

I really didn’t know my paternal grandfather well. Well, at all. He died when I was four or five years old (cancer, natch). But I have a record of marches that once belonged to him that’s a personal relic. Not so much because it was his, but because of when we got it.

Continue reading “Personal Relics: My Grandfather’s Marches” →

Over the weekend, my children attended a birthday party and got temporary tattoos with a nautical theme as befit a pair of pirates. So Daddy talked a little extraneously extemporaneously about tattoos, and how members of the military often got them, including their Uncle Kevin and their great-grandfather Raymond. Ray, my grandfather, had a blue Marine bulldog on his arm, marred by the scar where he’d been shot while helping take Okinawa.

Suddenly, I thought to go to the coat closet and bring out a bit of history for them: My grandfather’s jacket^*. Continue reading “Personal Relics: My Grandfather’s Jacket” →

Growing up, I was always the scrawny, gangly, gawky nerd kind.  I had glasses since I was five years old, I lacked some basic motor skills, and I didn’t have much musculature.  So I only took the requisite gym classes and that was that.

Sometime in the middle of my adulthood, I started going to the gym.  In my middle twenties, I got hold of a weight set and pumped a little iron while I lived in my mother’s basement.  My stunning physique, or at least my physique and my knowledge of Objectivism and poetry, landed me a hot chick girlfriend who liked to go to the gym.  So I started.  But first I had to look around for some essential gymming gear.  And I had what I needed at hand:

When I moved from my aunt’s basement in St. Charles, Missouri, to a mobile home in Jefferson County, I switched from a middle school that had gym in street clothes to a middle school that had a gym in gym clothes.  That meant I had to acquire a pair of blue shorts and a lock for the locker.  Coach Haug, the gym teacher, sold both, and for $5 I got this green-dialed lock.

It served me in middle school, in high school, and then got dropped in a set of boxes and/or drawers until I returned to the gym.  I’ve used it at the Mid-County YMCA in St. Louis County, the Edward Jones YMCA, Gold’s Gym, the Webster Groves YMCA, and now the Pat Jones YMCA.  It’s guaranteed to be the only green lock in the locker room, which means I’ll never lose my daily locker.  And I haven’t had to learn another combination in 25 years.

The gym bag isn’t that old.  As you can see by its side, it commemorates Super Bowl XXIV (24 in American).  I didn’t get the bag from the pizza company.  Christmas, 1990, was my freshman year in college, and I worked at a grocery store (Gold’s Shop Rite).  The Golds were known for their great Christmas party, and 1990 was my first (and only).  It was a snowy night in Milwaukee, as so many are in December.  Patti C (“Does the C stand for “Cakes?” I’d asked when she started) drove Shawn and I the five blocks to hall the company rented.  There, some dancing occurred, and an easily led young me performed the Worm for co-workers with the guys from Produce, who I thought were the coolest guys in the world when I was 18.  When I was 19, I was in Produce, and I was right when I was younger.

During college, I looped the handles of this bag through the back straps of my backpack and the two served as my luggage when I travelled by train between Milwaukee and Missouri.  Then it sat in a closet for a couple of years, brought out occasionally to supplement my luggage for travel between Missouri and Milwaukee.  Since I’ve gotten back to the gym, it’s born my clothes, the lock, gloves, and magazines exclusively.

Both of these articles are in good shape, as well as one could expect with fairly frequent use in infrequent bursts of fitness diligence on my part.  They’ve lasted me 25 and 20 years respectively; there’s really no reason why they won’t last another 20 or so.

   You can tell I’m a serious reader, not one of the rank amateurs who merely picks up the latest mass market paperback for airplane or beach reading or who parrots lines from the latest hot talk show host book club’s recommendation so I can sound smart at card parties. No, it’s not the fact that I carry snapshots of my library instead of my children to show to random coffee shop patrons. My continual enumeration of the books I read each year and my easy answer to questions of what I’ve read lately don’t give me away. The identifier that signals my serious pursuit of letters, which can often include mass market paperbacks and hardback thrillers amid the serious highsnoot stuff, is my good bookmark.

   Make no mistake, I own more than my share of the common paper bookmarks that blizzard any book buyer. I have colorful, bag-stuffing scrips of paper with the names of the large chain bookstores and the large Internet bookstores. I have many folded, worn used bookstore bookmarks from shops I have visited in myriad cities across the country. I even have several from used bookstores that I’ve never visited that came with books I bought elsewhere. I have a couple of bookmarks enclosed with unsolicited fundraising appeals; I didn’t send money, but I kept the bookmarks. We even have one or two congratulatory bookmarks given for elementary or middle school achievements floating around here. All get their usage between book covers.

   During my reading lifetime, I’ve not been particular about separating the pages where I last imbibed the language with a piece of refined bookmarkery. I’ve used envelopes, receipts, the odd note page, napkins, smaller books, and other varied materiel to let myself know where to resume and to mark for the world exactly how many pages’ worth of wisdom I bore. When one is away from home, one must make do with what nature and its descendent civilization provide. When I am at home, I prefer to use a real bookmark, and for the main book I am reading at any time, I use the good bookmark.

   I speak its very name with reverence, as one speaks of the good china. This good bookmark bears my last initial stamped into the top and looks to be brass. The front side shines brightly, and the rear displays a handsome sheen of green paint. Like all good things, it is formal and practical at once.

   I received this particular bookmark as a graduation gift when I matriculated from high school. No doubt, my distant aunt bought the bookmark at the bookstore when she was buying my gift certificate and impulsively added the five dollar’s worth of finery to my gift. Regardless, it not only bore my initial, but it became mine.

   Almost twenty years later, the memories of most gifts from that era have faded after the utility or quality of the gifts faded or failed. I’m sure I spent the accumulated capital on used books as I bought reading material for the interim summer. I wore the clothes, played the harmonica a couple of times, and I forgot the thoughtful or thought-free presentations of friends and family. But the bookmark lives on.

   The bookmark retained some of its mint condition by spending much of the 1990s in a complete collection of Emily Dickinson’s work, somewhere in the middle 700s of her numbered list. A few years ago, during one of the periods when I continued my trek through the wilderness of poor capitalization, I swapped out the good bookmark for a pair of bookmarks—one to tell me where I am, and one to tell me how long I had to go to finish the hundreds of poems Dickinson wrote in 1865.

   So while those bookmarks spend the next decade in the Dickinson, I use the good bookmark now for my primary reading material. It lends a certain air of class to my reading, elevates my place marking. Anyone who invests in or continues to use an actual piece of metal to mark a place in a book obviously plans to mark a lot of books with a permanent artifact.

   I’ll have to remember again to thank my aunt, long after she has forgotten the gift.

I used my translucent pink clipboard the other day. I had an essay I wanted to proofread, so I detached the clipboard from its underused lined pad and clipped the essay onto it. The lined pad, with its years’ old plans and next big thing ideas, I put back into the organizer on my desk. I have things so well organized in that rudiment of civilization that I hate to take them out. But I needed the clipboard, so it came out.

I am reaching the age where every little trinket in my life has an origin in the mists of my time, and the clipboard originates from my college days. Not so much my college days, but the weekends in between my college days. For a brief period, I gamed with a couple of friends in B—’s basement on Sunday nights. Sunday afternoons, I could use my father’s car, so I would round up the gang and we would spend Sunday afternoon and evening in the basement of the townhouse where B— and his mother lived. The basement had the décor of a middle 20th century rec room, with a tile floor, the old couch, and a card table. On the off-hand weeknights, we’d gather to game or to pretend we could play musical instruments together. But on Sunday nights, we’d game.

A couple of late adolescents, dice, pencils, and paper called for something more, but we didn’t know what. Until B— discovered it. One weekend, he presented each of us with a clipboard to make it easier for us to maintain our personal character score sheets. As he produced them from somewhere offstage, he said he’d been to an office supply store and found a sale. Considering that we all earned a minimum wagesque paycheck at the time, his bounty probably represented a not insignificant portion of his disposable income. Much to our chagrin (and, no doubt, to the office supply store manager who eventually put them on sale), the clipboards were pink. No right-minded young man would use a pink clipboard.

But they were free enough at the time, and no right-minded minimum wage earner overlooks the generous excess of a friend. Particularly when that gaudy and potentially effeminate excess can be enjoyed in a basement where overlooked New Year’s parties, games of strategy, and Ghostriders’ band practices occurred. We accepted the plastic clipboards, no doubt edgy statements at a time where clipboards were still made of laminated chipboard, and we used them throughout those Sunday evenings in our youth.

As I proofread whatever it was I wanted to revise, my attention was split to include the history of the device upon which I was working and those nights long ago. I’ve had the clipboard longer than I’ve had my degree, my wife, my career, my Web log, and my son. Whenever I need a place upon which I want to correct my printed scribblings or, for some reason, to attach tablets which already feature their own hard cardboard surfaces, I turn to this single pink, semi-transparent piece of plastic.

Of all the things I’ve mentioned, it will survive. When these words are forgotten, when my marriage and my line have faded into even greater obscurity than from which they have sprung, when my Internet postings have finally emanated into the ether, when the library has given me much pleasure has moldered into fertilizer for future weeds, some archeologist aeons hence will dust off this pink clipboard from the remnants of this homestead or some landfill. With some thought and study, future historians might regard this one possession of mine and will find it reflective of its owner and his civilization.

A plate upon which this primitive dined, no doubt, with a metal clip to hold upon it the wriggling prey.