There’s only one thing that I took with me to Australia for a year after I graduated high school in 1984. I also took it with me when I moved to Orlando in 1993 and with me when I moved to Los Angeles in 1994 — my Junior and Senior year high school yearbooks.
There are shirts and shorts I’ve worn for a decade or more.
For about a decade, I kept a gum wrapper where this girl Rachel had written her phone number for me in 1984 in Gladstone. I believe she died a few years later in a car accident.
I kept for decades two videotapes of things I did in high school for the local community access channel — interviews, basketball commentary, local news reports, but finally last year I transferred them to digital.
I’ve moved many times in my life and so I’m ruthless with junk. I just throw it away. I like to feel light and the more stuff I have, the heavier I feel.
Every move is wrenching. I have to decide who and what I’ll take with me. It forces me to make choices and to establish priorities and to decide what parts of me must die so that others may live.
But I keep dipping back into my yearbooks, particularly when I’ve heard someone has died. Those were my vivid years. Wherever I go, I think I’ll take them with me.
