The Drawer

According to my special dates calendar, today is supposed to be "Clean Up Your Room Day."  Well we all know that isn't going to happen.

But as I was setting this page up I read back over the 2000 entry, "The Drawer."  It was interesting to read the things the drawer that I describe as "Do you have a "drawer" in your house? You know...the place where everything gets stored when it has no other home. I read a journal recently where the writer went through a drawer in his home. It inspired me to look through our "drawer." This is the middle drawer in our kitchen counter. For years whenever someone is looking for something small, the standard response is "look in "the drawer." Even though there are five drawers in that counter, everybody knows which drawer to look in."  A quick check at the drawer now shows that I got rid of a lot of the old stuff and now there is a bnch of new stuff, including a lot of electronic stuff for computers I no longer have.

The first thing on the 2000 entry is this "Adult Perpetual Diary" which I bought umpty-ump years ago to record special annual events. In 2000, i said, 

"I’ve been doing this now for over 30 years. The book itself is a tour through my life."  Since I wrote that 19 years ago, I guess the book is now nearly 50 years old  and still resides in "the drawer." I find the birth dates of people I worked with in the early 1960s, people now dead, people with whom I’ve had a falling out. Each name is a new story.  I haven't added new names in this book for a long time, but I can't throw it away or i will forget when Arthur Conrad's birthday is (he was an actor/choreographer who died in about 1987)

This was an interesting find

At some time I thought I wanted a charm bracelet and started filling it.  I can't remember what all these are, but there is a little Half Dome (from Yosemite), a Skunk Train, a little National Cathedral in DC, both the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and that thing that is on the top there is a drunk on a lamppost, a remembrance of the physics textbook I typed, which used that as an example of the "random walk problem," probably the only thing in that book I actually understood.  I haven't worn the bracelet in a very long time because (a) my wrist is now too big and (b) it bothers me to have anything on my wrist--I don't even wear a watch any more.

I see there are very old tic tacs, an unwrapped little tin of Altoids, 2 knobs from the drawers in the kitchen, a chap stick (which I'm happy to see since my lips have been very chapped this week)

There are three souvenir spoons, two very tarnished.  At one point I collected lots of these spoons, but several years ago, gave them all to my cousin, who wanted to use them to make a project.  These are three that I must have overlooked in collecting them for her.

The one on the left is from "Judy Garland's birthplace"; the one in the middle is from Amsterdam, and the one on the right is from Wales.

I also found something cut off of a box which has a recipe for tilapia.  Since I won't cook tilapia any more, since I found out it is a garbage fish, fed from animal feces, and can't forget the photo I saw, I don't know why I kept the recipe.

There are two and a half pairs of earrings.  I tried putting on the middle pair and couldn't get one to go through my left earlobe.  This pair was made by a woman I used to work with at the ob/gyn office.  I might actually throw away the white one, since it has no mate.

This is a business card holder that I don't know that I ever used.  The cards that are in there now are outdated, since while our phone number is the same, the area code has changed, which I discovered when I found one of these cards to give to Sandy and he tried sending me a text message.  Too bad because I have about 1,000 more of these cards in a box somewhere here in my office!.

Of course there are lots of rubber bands in the drawer.  I think they are left over from when I went through this drawer in 2000, most of them left over from when David delivered newspapers.  He delivered papers in grammar school.  He died in 1996 at age 24.  I still have the rubber bands. Often I drove with him on his route and it was a great time to be together early in the morning. I can remember the times that we would sit on the floor of the family room, at 5 a.m., putting these rubber bands around the newspapers, then loading them into the car and heading off on the route. Once David and Tom got snowed in at Lake Tahoe and I had to deliver the route myself. It nearly killed me. It’s impossible to find house numbers in the dark in Davis. What used to take David 15 minutes took me 2 hours.

This is a splicer leftover from the days when I used to make movies and edit them.  I haven't made a movie since the advent of digital photography and don't have a clue why I have held on to this for decades.

There is also a package of shoelaces which say "made in Australia," which I'm certain pre-date my friendship with Peggy and a plastic thing with Mickey Mouse on it.  I don't know what it was intended t o be, but it is broken and can't be what it was supposed to be.

Maybe I'll throw some of this stuff away...or leave it there for another 10 years so I have another excuse to write an entry entitled "The drawer."