A Box Of Letter

I have a large box…It's an old beer case really, from back when they were still made out of hard cardboard and you had to open them from the top. It's a Miller case that I have lugged around with me since I moved to Olympia back in 1980. In it I used to throw the mail I would get from friends I left behind overseas, letters from Sweetie, who loves me still, old birthday cards, bad song lyrics, pictures and other assorted odds and ends. Today it's full, as it has been for about the last ten or fifteen years, sitting in a back closet minding it's own business and gathering dust.

You may not believe me but I am not a person who usually holds on to things like that. Having moved around a lot in my life, I've become more than adept at throwing things out. I am not the kind of manic hoarder you no doubt envision me, having held on to a box of letters from over twenty years ago. Nor am I much of a sentimentalist. I don't take them out periodically like old trophies and re-examine my lost youth, looking wistfully at a life that seems so far removed from my life today. But I also don’t think it’s just chance that the only two things I have carried around with me from that time in my life is that box and a few old yearbooks. Oh wait, that’s a lie...there are three things. There's also a tiny old basketball trophy from when I was eleven or twelve.

I know if I sat down and thought hard enough I probably could gather some insight into why just these three things. I have said before that life is not so deep that a small bit of surface self-examination wouldn't lead to some sort of personal revelation. But in truth these days I'm not all that interested in the answers, so much of what makes life interesting lies in its mystery. I have always had a held-fast belief that answers are far less fascinating than questions anyway. A belief that has panned out time after time in everything from seeing 2010 (the sequel to 2001: a space odessey, starting Roy Scheider) to what makes Apple OS X such a user-friendly operating system (computer code…*yawn*) or even just how movies get made (believe me, more boring than you can imagine). Too much self-examination is not always a healthy thing. I like a nice sausage now and then, but I know enough about myself to know that I’m not all that interested in how they’re made.

But I’ve digressed...

Right now you’re saying, “yeah but why a bunch of old letters?” I guess I really have only this to say in my defense; there are ghosts in that box. Ghosts of the past, and at times, the present as well. I might be wrong, but it seems to me that a small box hidden in a back of a closet is the perfect place to keep real life manifestations of a subconscious metaphor.

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