And then I opened my Box of the Past.

There was an eye-watering amount of chlorine in the pool at the Holidome where my family celebrated all of my birthdays from the year I learned how to swim until the year a training bra was suggested, but not yet mandatory.

And what had me thinking about the Holidome this week was not so much that my birthday is coming up, but that the Great British bake off has started a new season (with Nigella Lawson taking over the judging, which we will surely discuss at some point) and several of the bakers last week cheffed up a Black Forest Stout Cake.

Well.

Add some booze to a frozen Sara Lee and it’s all coming back to me now.

 
Hello holidome birthday cake.

And quarters for space invaders.

And cannonballs and Marco Polos and handstands in the pool while my mom read a book in a lawn chair and kept one eye on us in case we stayed the water longer than it should take to find the coin we kept tossing to the bottom.

I hadn’t thought of any of that for years. And then a black forest cake appeared in front of me.

There are memories that are part of the stories we tell about ourselves all the time.
And there are memories that disappear so completely that we don’t know they’re still there until something brings them back.
 
When I moved abroad in 2016, I’d decided that very few things were moving with me.

Which meant that I had to go through my NYC apartment and figure out where all that stuff was going if it wasn’t going where I was.

Which also meant that I had to look at all of the things I’d been holding on to for decades, carrying with me from apartment to apartment in a box I hysterically and ominously referred to as “My Box of the Past.”

I knew vaguely what was in the box.

It had become a bit of a time capsule over the years. But my Gawd when I opened it up one Saturday afternoon to go through it, I was like...I am now going to pour myself a cocktail because this twenty-minute project has just turned into an event.

The script from my 5th grade production of The Wizard of Energy where I played Delinquent Dorothy.

The varsity letters that never made it onto a letter jacket because my mom was like, Are you really going to wear a varsity letter jacket instead of your regular coat? And I was like, Actually I prefer my coat.

 
I hadn’t thought of that conversation in years.

Or that coat.

Or even the varsity letters, including one for track and field?

When did I earn a varsity letter for track and field?!

No idea, but there it was in My Box of the Past.

Sitting on top of a bunch of dead, dried up flower petals that I have no idea where they came from or why I kept them.

And one dead, dried up flower wrist corsage that I suddenly did remember.

I remembered all kinds of things that I hadn’t thought about in 40 years.

I remembered the boy who gave it to me. I remembered how we broke up before the Prom, but then we got back together. I remember we had like 30 minutes to get ready for the Prom because the school had somehow scheduled an away baseball game for the same day and while he was playing First Base, I was keeping score and I remember it was sunny and that we both came home with weird sunburns on our nose.

We all know objects can remind us of things.
What we don’t always know is whether an object is going to remind us of anything until it does.
A Black Forest cake can suddenly hand you an entire childhood birthday at the Holidome. A dried-up corsage can hand you a boy you haven’t thought about in forty years.

 
There are things in your home that you can toss into the garbage without giving them a single thought.

And there are things that you absolutely need to take a minute with.

Because “Do I need this? Do I want this? Will I use this?” can be such absurdly inadequate questions when you’re dealing with a lifetime of stuff.

 
Of course I don’t need a dead corsage.

Or letters made of felt in red and gold.

Or the script of a play that hasn’t been performed since the Spring of 1980.

But then I opened a box, thinking I was going to see if there was anything in there worth holding on to, and all of a sudden without a word of warning, I was making contact with a moment in a day in a life I’d completely forgotten about.

 
It’s not a surprise to find memories attached to things.

But I am often surprised by which things are holding memories.

And which memories something is holding.


This is why a drawer takes two hours to clean out when you think it should take twenty minutes.

And it’s why you can open a box, completely prepared to get rid of most of it, and suddenly be sitting on the floor thinking about someone you haven’t thought about since 1993.

You’re not being “too sentimental.”

You’re encountering fragments of your life that’d been lost.

Until something gave them back to you.

 
It is true that you don’t have to preserve your entire life in order to remember having lived it.

It is also true that there are moments from your life that you simply don’t remember until Nigella Lawson bakes a Black Forest Stout Cake and your eyes start watering from the memory of chlorine.

When that happens and you’re in the process of deciding what stuff still belongs in your life and what doesn’t? Well, your decision making just became more complicated.

Because now that you’ve got the memories back, what will you do with the thing that brought them back?
 
This is not the part where I tell you what to do with your magical-memory-conjuring stuff.

Because nobody can tell you what to do.

 
What I can tell you to do when you’re standing there with the corsage in your hand, is this:

Stop thinking about what you’re going to do with it for a minute and just acknowledge that the dead flower bracelet worked some kind of magic and brought back a First Baseman in a rented tux whose pants were a smidge too short but nobody cared because he was the handsomest boy you ever ate chocolate fondue with.

Give yourself a minute to enjoy the story.

Let yourself feel whatever the hell you’re going to feel.

And then come back to the corsage and decide if you want to keep it.

 
Which is not the same decision as: Was that memory important?

Or: Was that boy important?

Or: Was that version of me important?

Or: Will throwing this away somehow mean I don’t care about any of it?

 
Do you want to keep the corsage is an entirely separate question.

Maybe after you’ve had your minute, you look at that pathetic crispy old thing and think, Are you kidding? First Baseman gave me this. It’s staying until one of us turns to dust.

Cool.

Maybe you put it in your jewelry box where you can see it every day because Holy track and field, I love this stupid thing!

Awesome.

Maybe you chuck it in the garbage bag because What a night! What a boy! What a ridiculous scheduling decision! And OMG no, I do not want a 40-year-old dead flower in my house.

Also an excellent choice.

 
There’s no wrong answer here.

There is only your answer.

Unless there is black forest cake and the answer is always yes.

 
Your friend who has questions about her apparently illustrious track-and-field career,
Vivian