Being bored and feeling a little guilty about not doing any work in the Box Room today, I went in and did some work on it. I just had the first of what I expect to be at least a few very depressing moments. Once I had the bike out of there, I moved that stupid carpet (couldn’t move it far alone), and I found a very, very old box of things from 1984. In said box was one of my ceramic works and my high school yearbooks. The ear was broken of the ceramic piece, and I can’t find the ear. That isn’t the depressing thing.

The depressing thing is that a colony of silverfish apparently took up residence in my yearbooks at some point over the decades when that box was in a variety of non-climate-controlled storage rooms (didn’t look like recent damage and there were no silverfish to be seen thankfully), and I had to throw them out. They were in worse shape than the Dead Sea Scrolls … all in pieces and stuck together. They crumbled when I moved them. I cried when I tossed them into the trash bin.

We didn’t have a lot of money for cameras or film developing when I was in high school, and now there’s a whole four years of my life in pictures that’s just gone. I think all total, I have about three rolls of photos of my friends and myself from those years. So I have a few, but I won’t have the silly notes my friends wrote in my yearbooks, I won’t have the photos of the clubs I was in or the activities I did. I know there are people I was close to back then that I have no photos of at all. It’s just all very saddening.

Well, I wanted to let go of the past, right? High school was so long ago, and to be honest, I have fewer good memories than I do bad ones. Maybe it’s for the best it all ends up in the trash and not looked through and thought about over and over. I still have my good memories after all, right in my tiny little brain where they have always been. The only thing that will take those away is old age, and I think I have a few years before that starts happening. At least I certainly hope so.

But … but … I had to throw away my high school yearbooks, and that just really, really sucked.

1981 wasn’t as damaged as the rest of them. It’s on the porch in case there are any bugs in it. Later, I may try to save a few photos from it. Or not. Maybe I should just toss it too. I don’t know.