There comes a time...
…when you look around and think, “I have too much stuff.” And if, like me, you are sentimental and/or think your stuff represents you, you struggle with letting go, even if you have room to store it.
I was ten when I received my first letter in the mail. It was from the Post cereal company, rejecting my submission for the back of one of their cereal boxes. I was thrilled! A letter addressed to me! An acknowledgement that I existed! I saved that letter, and every letter since, until 2001.
The first full box of old letters to me disappeared from my attic in Florida the same summer that my second-most-recent Ex’s daughter stayed with us. Late 1980’s, I think. She was an aspiring writer, and pretty much kept to her room, which was next to the attic entrance. Somewhat of a free-spirit-would-be-hippie chick, she married a religious and conservative young man (after having married a Mexican man so he’d get his green card), and she has become a mover and shaker in Republican circles in Florida. I think she took the letters and couldn’t/wouldn’t own up to it. O, lost…
The rest of the letters I’d kept in a blue Rubbermaid tub, which I rediscovered in my shed years ago. I organized them by year and sorted them into Ingles milk cartons. I stored them in the closet space above my wash machine. Until now.
I recently asked a tall friend to haul the boxes out of the storage space, and have been thinking about going through them before they get tossed, or scanned/saved. And the more I thought about it, the more it came to me that - because until I was 10 years old, I did not know I was a separate person from my next-oldest brother Greg - those letters were proof that I was my own person.
See, our little Wisconsin town’s schools had combined grades, and because our birthdates were only 11 months apart, we started 1st grade together, and were always in the same classroom until he went into 5th grade - in another classroom.
That’s when it was discovered by others that I didn’t know how to tell time (why would I have learned? I just did whatever my brother did, and it was fine.) Then I got the reputation for being stupid - which lasted waaay longer than it needed to.
To wit: I was about 32 years old, working at the National Theatre in DC, living on a houseboat in the Potomac Channel. I’d already had good jobs at The Phone Company and Mercer University; not a slacker. At the time, I was casually dating a guy named John who was renting a sailboat a couple of slips down from me. Mom and Dad were visiting from Wisconsin, and my sister Chris, who lived nearby, brought them to the marina so they could see where I lived. (They always went to visit their children whenever one of us moved. So they got around the US a lot!). John happened to be an Episcopalian priest. As Chris led Mom and Dad back up the gangplank, John and I were holding hands, heading out to Georgetown to see the film Amadeus. Mom stopped, turned to John, and said, “John, surely you can do better than poor, stupid Lucy!” John, being an intelligent priestly type, said something that made us all feel better.
Fast forward to about 2001, when my Ex wanted to have an affair with a woman in Florida. He said, “You always wanted to go to college, so why don’t you stay in NC over the winter, and go to UNCA?” So I did, and that was the beginning of the end of our marriage. (Apparently I was the only one in our circle of friends who did not know about his affair. In the long run, she did me a favor. A year later, she dumped him.) Anyhoo - it was in the first Psych 101 class at UNCA that I learned that until you are 10 years old, your neural pathways (or whatever they are called) are helping you learn how to learn.
=LIGHT BULB=
Until Greg had gone into a different classroom when I was 10, I had never learned to learn. It’s taken me the better part of my adult life - thankfully jammed with many different kinds of experiences - to understand that I know who I am and I do not have to look at any of those old letters. I think I had been keeping them to prove I am somebody.
(I did donate my Vietnam penpal’s letters to the War Letters Archive in southern California, so those are safe.)
Now that they’ve lifted the outdoor burn ban here, my old letters are going up in smoke, but I’m still here.
Love,
Lucy