Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
I am sure that this is not true, but it seems that every item I was attached to in my youth ended up in the nightmare that was my closet after our house fire. We got to go back through the house after it was put out to see if there was anything salvageable, and it was traumatic. I will never forget what it looked like. The doors were open, and my clothes were wet and dirty with plastic all over them…. and at first, the plastic didn’t make sense. Then, I realized that it was the hangers. They were blue. Cornflower curlicues designed my clothes in a way no one would have ever wanted….. because not only were they stuck to the hangers, they were stuck to each other.
Because of the disaster in my closet, I did not notice my PC and printer. It’s good that I didn’t at first, because that would have ended me. In those days, just as now, I used my word processor extensively. I didn’t get a new computer in my room for many years. That’s when I put my journals into a backpack and again, stored them away in my closet……. until an air conditioner leaked all over the backpack and I could no longer read the ink. Given what the journaling was about, I’m glad it’s irretrievable. If I don’t need them, no one else does, either….. and this is solid. There is no Lanagan historical value in it except to say that it was my blog before I could type.
Because even though I did create documents as an elementary school kid, I wasn’t the writer at nine that I was at 13. After my hormones kicked in, I actually needed a place that was all my own. Before then, school assignments took up most of my work…. most often in “Print Shop” rather than WordPerfect.
If you had a computer, Print Shop, and a dot matrix printer, you could own a school in six minutes. Every teacher wanted you to make them a banner, and every kid that came to my house wanted to make their own.
Those memories were the ones that hit the hardest as I realized I couldn’t do those things anymore. “Well,” I thought. “There goes all my extra credit.”
So, if you ask me what item I was incredibly attached to, I can say it was my computer first and foremost…… but in reality, everything I ever loved at that age was important. I am not even sure I am telling the truth about the computer. It may or may not have been my most prized possession….. maybe it was a doll. But if it was, I couldn’t see it under the rubble, and the image of the computer stayed.
That’s because it was melted into my desk.
Stories That Are All True 