Ever Bin?

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 20:19:00 -0400
personal-stories

When I walked into my childhood home in Los Angeles late on a Tuesday night in October, what struck me first were the things that had not changed. It had been more than six years since my last visit, and in my memory the house had taken on a soft glow like a half-remembered dream. But as I stood with my parents in the family room, seeing for the first time the kitchen they remodeled half a decade ago and the souvenirs from recent trips abroad, what I really noticed were the tangible reminders of a bygone age: the familiar brick fireplace, the wallpaper, and the books still in their places on the shelves.

Alone in my old bedroom at midnight, I opened the doors to what had once been my closet and found, undisturbed, my collection of plastic bins. Each was filled with artifacts from a specific period in my earlier life: school papers, awards, letters, receipts, buttons, handwritten notes, official bulletins. In a time before electronic data storage and ubiquitous cell phone cameras, these documents and artifacts had been the stuff and substance of everyday life. I pulled out one of the bins, with the label “Harvard Law School, 1989-1991,” and began to sift.

At first I was simply hoping to find anything that might have mentioned a certain fellow student who had been elected President of the United States since the last time I had opened the bin. (I did, but nothing more interesting than a school directory). But I got caught up in memories. Here was the final exam I took in Evidence, my scribbles all over the typed page; here was my research for the first year Moot Court competition; here the minutes of some tense Law School Council meetings. Suddenly I was 22 years old again, lonely and full of self-doubt, in an alien place that left me cold. In copies of the newsletter I had created for my first year class I saw signs of my conflicting desires to belong to the group and to belong only to myself; to dive in and to seek shelter. At midnight 20 years later, I could see with perfect clarity both how far I had come since the time of the bin and how my younger self persists in me. I treasured having direct access to the memories of rough times (and some good ones too), and felt grateful for every vital aspect of my life today that I could never have envisioned years ago.

Later in my visit, my parents suggested that I take those bins with me back to Baltimore. Someday, maybe I will. But for now, I’m very glad to know that all those artifacts are safe in my old closet, in airtight containers, never fading, thousands of miles away.

Twenty years from now, what will you discover in your bins?
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