Gray Matters, Part 2

Listening to a recording of Bela Fleck strumming banjo rhythms to a soaring woman's voice, and I'm awash in sentimentality. I was thinking today of the homestead in San Francisco, a place many of you have visited many times. My, how that home has collected some things, and my, how that house has eaten up some of those collected things without a trace, akin to the warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So, here's the start of a growing list of things I wish I knew the location of:

My 3" square (non-bendy) floppy disks that I used with my LCII and Quadra Macs. Does anyone use the word Macintosh anymore? Included in that set will be the New Haven/San Francisco Connection disk containing many-paged Word docs between me and Kevin Fox when we were in college. We sent the disk back and forth, and priceless Top Tens, side-splitting stories and some things we wish would remain buried would emerge... would be priceless, if found.

My View Master disks and the projector (as well as the red hand-held viewer) through which my 3-10 year old self would gaze at 3D versions of movies I had never seen, including Herbie the Love Bug, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, random Flintstones episodes and about thirty other lovelies all on little disks with gear-like teeth on the edges. Even if most of them were Disney, they were a big part of my childhood and may (literally) be priceless, if found.

This one old, small, pinkish 33RPM record player, with some detachable speakers that may have been more like ginormous echo chambers. With it, in a box, should be a record collection of stories with booklets accompanying them, the kind where you listen to the record and follow the story and you'd turn the page when you heard the sound (usually Tinkerbell's magic wand) brrriiNGGGGG! Classic Disney tales plus Chicken Soup with Rice, Where the Wild Things Are, and some others that bounce around my memory. Then there was GI Joe, but not the modern GI Joe, just a guy named Joe who was a GI. He'd go on crazy adventures all around the world, pre-Indiana Jones, and do battle with mysterious cultures while stealing artifacts. My favorite was one involving a mummy, a dune buggy, rock n' roll, and a bunch of warriors yelping.

There are more. All of them will have one thing in common: I never thought I'd be without them. Not that I'm dying to watch my Viewmaster right now, but I just never gave the OK for those certain things to disappear. Those 'things' are not unlike memories, and I'm someone who spends a lot of my waking time with my memories. I hoard them by stubbornly refusing to let them go, searching for them in my mind as if to just check in with them, see that they're all there, and go on a rescue mission if they are missing. Memories wallpaper every room in my mind and keeping those memories has been effortless. Every family vacation, every concert tour and camp, every football postseason in the 1980s, every note in every song every year... that's just the start. So, I'm sort of writing to file a complaint with someone, because I'm finding this very new sensation of my memories being pruned to be a little disconcerting. Which is also a reason why I will always write, journal, blog, scribble. To preserve what I know while I know it well.