Sunday, August 07, 2022

Digging Up Ghosts

(Photo circa 1980s)

The past comes at a cost. 

Saturday, my buddy Alex drove me to the storage facility near here and we reclaimed 20 boxes of my journals, files, letters, clippings, photos, artwork and books. The lady at the storage place had to break the lock to our unit, because no one remembers where its key made off to.

We just couldn’t watch her do it. It was scary. The sparks flew and her arms were shaking as she cut through the strip of metal protecting my past. But in the end she prevailed.

Sure, it’s great to be reunited with my stuff for the first time since pre-covid, don’t get me wrong. But it’s strange too. Glancing through the boxes brings glimpses of an entire lifetime, for better and for worse. There are things from my childhood, from college, from my career like old copies of SunDance, Rolling Stone and Mother Jones. Photos of a younger me, the reporter on the hunt. So earnest and so certain, not like now.

There are translations of the books I wrote in foreign languages, artwork my kids made that I consider precious, old collections of baseball cards, shells, coins, seaglass and more. But one thing we couldn’t transport was the large painting of Patty Hearst as Tania that served as the cover of Rolling Stone for “The Inside Story.” It’s so big it will require a separate trip.

So that will stay in storage for a while longer 

Hey, I’m just not sure that I am ready to open up these boxes stacked over there a few feet from where I sit. They remember things I might prefer to forget.

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