Photo Frames, Baseball Jerseys, and Excessive Intoxication.

Thursday, May 2^nd, 2019

8:53 PM

The one thing that still evokes a sense of nostalgia within me is the rectangular, red color Tupperware gifted to me by Jason, a mere acquaintance who I’d met at church before he moved to Italy for an apprenticeship.

Today, as I sit here, with my hair slowly greying, shoulders stiffening and knees crying for help during my weekly yoga sessions, that gift I received on my thirteenth birthday remains dear to me and has given me solace when people weren’t by my side. I vividly remember, just a few weeks after our girls’ trip to Cancun, Alan, my crush from primary school, who I was in a long-distance relationship with for three and a half years, had gotten charges pressed against him by Mindy, my co-worker at Barnes and Noble, for sharing unsolicited pictures with her over text. That night, I devoured half the supply of black licorice I’d stored in my Tupperware. Another such incident that immediately rings some bells is when my grandson was denied from Harvard Business School and needed half a jar a Nutella and four servings of cheese-flavored Ritz Crackers as consolation. At present, it sits at the back of the kitchen counter beneath the spices’ cabinet and contains a single strawberry puff pastry that my daughter had given to me.

Just the other night, I’d seen a post on Facebook from my neighbor Brenda who I met in my Microbiology class in college. It was a photo taken at my College Reunion from a couple months ago. In it, there were three hundred and thirty-nine students, me included, sprawled across the Willets Hall at Swarthmore College in a phoenix-like frenzy. It was just friendly banter about hobbies, personal life, financial issues and telenovelas. The same day, when I talked to Ryan, I learnt that him and his wife run an online store where they curate collages using photographs sent in by people in their community and frame them with antique frames which he collected in his gap year after high school on his trip to Wichita. He said, and I quote, “I want to remind people of their childhood and professional life, when they were at the peak of their productivity and dreamed big to make strides in the right direction that led them to where they are today.” With a generous offer and a little convincing, he handed me a heavily edited brochure and asked me to ring him up when I wanted to buy one myself.

When I think about my life in the grand scheme of things, it all seems like a blur. While living on the Prairie has been a great learning experience, it is indeed a simple time and looking back, I’m rather content with my life and don’t recall anything particularly challenging that is worth sharing. The people close to me are all on their own courses of life, pursuing things that matter to them and doing things they love. To summarize, my time having passed, I now find engagement in solving crossword puzzles, watching the television, and knitting; nothing out of the ordinary.   

Tuesday, May 7^th, 2019

9:18 PM

They say that boundaries keep others out, but in my experience, when I try to keep my social circle confined to just my family and a few friends, incidents involving a plethora of social settings having their own arbitrary circumstances find their ways to get incorporated in your life. This was an apt description of my childhood my life as a student.

As I was sweeping the floors of the attic, I caught glimpse of the oakwood chest I inherited from my mother five years before she succumbed to a debilitating viral pneumonia. It was painted emerald green, covered in rhinestones and had my mother’s name engraved and gold-plated underneath its lock. I considered it to be a rather prized possession because as a woman who was a product of her environment, just like her mother, grandmother, sisters and aunts, my mother was subjected to a life of intensive manual labour, was a dutiful wife and spared time for the people that mattered to her.

When I opened it up, I found a dusty note attached under its lid. It was from my mother and read, “Dear Kailey, I’ve put together a few photo albums from your childhood and have included a number of tapes from your days when you were a student. I have also preserved some ancient relics that you collected when you were in elementary school. Open this up when you’re thinking of me and want a smile. Always yours, Mum.”

As I uncovered what I now consider gems, I felt an indescribable surge of nostalgia. My baseball jersey from sixty-four years ago seemed to be surprisingly intact, other than a few rips below the sleeves and the neckline. Another item that caught my eye almost immediately was a dilapidated cassette tape that seemed oddly familiar. It was a tape of me, dancing to an old age classic, Ivory Tower by Cathy Carr, which won me the first position in the Kansas Junior Dance Competition when I was a junior in high school. As I dug deeper into the treasure, I got my hands on the valedictory speech I’d written to present in front of the four hundred and fifty-three high school seniors. The chest also featured an opulent selection of rocks and seashells back from when I was only five years old. At the very bottom, I managed to get hold of a few candy bar wrappers from a fundraiser I initiated in middle school. With every artefact conscientiously scanned, there was only one last item that remained.

It was a three-leaf clover given to me by my classmate Irene moments before she died of breast cancer fifty-three years ago. As I read the note attached at the base of its stem, tears streamed down my eyes ruining my already raggedy chiffon mattress. Even though I learned to move on from much of it a while after, I finally realized how even though I’ve had an eventful life with no shortcomings in milestones and a fair share of achievements, I have attained an innate balance of sorrow, which makes my life all the worth sharing.

Saturday, May 11^th, 2019

7:34 PM

Marla had phoned me up today. The same Marla who ran over crossing guard Astrid when I lived over at Colonial Heights and the same Marla who’d sworn to never talk to me again after the soup kitchen incident, astonishingly wanted to talk to me. A little bit discombobulated, the only thing worth registering at nearly half-past three at midnight was that the last time we talked, was exactly twenty-nine years ago. Today marks twenty-nine years, four months and six days since I retired from my job at Barnes and Noble.

Some might argue that it was lousy and not particularly a productive sixteen years, specifically a stark contrast from my life as a student. While the yield of bread was low, I can confidently rebut that the years at my job as a cashier at one of the leading bookstores in the country has made me quite the storyteller.

Being a passably stimulating phase in my life, the time Carl and I crashed a jewelry store on Fifth Avenue and that other time when we played a massive joke on Brian the janitor, were two of some of my most profound memories. Looking back, if I were to pick something I am especially proud of, it would have to be the time when my downstairs neighbor Ellen and I drove off to New York City for a concert by David Bowie. After sneaking past security and post some much-needed intoxication, what wasn’t a clear sign of complete lapse of judgement had us on the frontpage of Telegraph Archive the very next morning. It featured an article about two naked girls kissing the base of a flagpole while singing the national anthem just before the commencement of the annual David Bowie concert in New York City; something that sounded vaguely familiar.

To the average Joe, this may sound excessive and even edging on impulsive. To me however, it proved to be sheer balance.