My So-Called Life

Vicki did almost a dozen hours of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint tutoring over the last four days, all of them here in our house. Because of that, Matt the shut-in has had to find other ways to occupy himself while she and her "gentleman friend" were working away. This is the same challenge that Vicki has whenever one of my Math students is over, but those sessions have always maxed out at 90 minutes whereas yesterday saw her working for most of a six-hour stretch!

So one of my out-of-sight, time-filling activities has been to pick up my office in the basement which has been a disaster area for years now. It is, quite frankly, one of the very few places in the house where I can just plop something down wherever it suits me and know that when I go looking for it weeks, months or even years later, it'll be exactly where I left it. As such, it's accumulated a lot of crap, all piled up and strewn rather randomly about. After several hours of effort while Vicki was busy upstairs, I've now made a dent in it, but it's far from being presentable just yet.

However, as always happens on such jobs, I've come across several interesting blasts from the past. Tonight I shared with Vicki one of the more poignant of them: a 3-page "autobiography" that I wrote as a school assignment in Grade 7 (and then added to, at the end of Gr 8). Several things struck us after I'd read it aloud:

• I was already writing with a lot of style and confidence in Grade 7!
• What I considered important then was sometimes right on target (comics, family, introspection) but occasionally hilarious (Doc Savage books, friends who I can't even remember all these years later)
• Several of the things that I thought (at the time) I understood about my own life turned out to be completely wrong
• I haven't changed nearly as much as I'd like to believe, between the ages of 13 and 47!

I'm amazed something like that survived the intervening years, as I lost most of the my non-comic-related keepsakes when my mother died and I didn't have enough space in my small apartment to hold on to much of what had been in her townhouse.

Anyway, that's the sort of trip down Memory Lane that you expect to take when you do a big cleanup job like I've started, and this one hasn't disappointed so far.