Last week, inspectors for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Unit were cleaning out their files at the United Nations headquarters in New York and came across a startling find: several vials of lethal chemicals locked in a sealed metal container. Of course, since these were lethal weapons inspectors, the U.N. personnel secured the vials until they could identify the chemicals.
The inspectors were going through "125 five-drawer cabinets, containing 16 years of inspection reports." I identify with that kind of tedious work. Before we left Texas, I went through a file cabinet of teaching materials, throwing away student papers I had kept as good examples of writing and extra copies of handouts I had held onto for each succeeding semester. Last week, I finished the job (mostly), sifting through 25 years of files. And while I didn't find anything as toxic as those U.N. inspectors found, I did discover that I've held onto items far too long. Some of my most unusual or interesting finds:
The paper, name place setting for my grandmother, on the occasion of my bridal luncheon 29 years ago. "Grandmother Dugat" is written on the front of the place setting, in my mother-in-law's handwriting. "Anita's bridal luncheon, Apr. 22, 1978" is written on the back in my grandmother's handwriting. Obviously, this item was something my grandmother kept to commemorate the occasion and then passed on to me during one of her own cleaning-out-the-files sessions.
My best graduate papers and the first research paper I wrote in college over thirty years ago. Although I was going to throw these items away--finally!--Mary-Margaret convinced me not to do so. Against my advice, M-M hopes to become an English teacher, and she is interested, she said, in reading these papers that I wrote on my way to becoming an English teacher. Hmmmmmm.........
A Dean's Honor Award from Texas A&M University's College of Engineering, recognizing me for "Outstanding Academic Achievement" for the fall semester of 1980. Of course, I was never an engineering student at Texas A&M. The award was a clerical mistake. I should have received the honor award for English, not Engineering. But I filed this award away all these years as a caution against taking even official records at face value. Now I'm sending it to Benton, who is an engineering student (though at rival UT-Austin), with directions to throw away the item after he has gotten a chuckle out of the parchment lie.
Three letters written to me by Stanley P. "Choo-Choo" Dyer, in 1976 and 1977. Choo-Choo, as friends and family called him, was the son of one of my father's best friends and a member of the TAMU Corps of Cadets. About four years older than I, he had wanted to date me, but I was already seriously involved with Tom. I read the letters to Mary-Margaret, who teared up and then said, "I am impressed. I don't know any boys who can write like that. Has this generation's genetic material been diminished?!" I assured her that in nine or ten years, perhaps some of the boys she knew would be able to write like Choo-Choo Dyer.
Choo-Choo was a character. He composed great portions of the letters in rhyming couplets, with a description in one of how he ran naked through the woods to worship his god. He also gave the young, very inexperienced me, brotherly advice: "Your heart," he assured me in one letter, "wants things to hurry up and become realities & your brain says take it easy & look things over--your [thoughts] are ruled first by one & then the other. . . .You cry for letters that do say something of life. You want letters that say something of the joys of the person--the dreams, the defeats, a person's self--the truth--Settle for no less--you also maybe cry because you just feel like it--for no reason.... ."
Choo-Choo went on to marry a lovely red-haired woman named Vicki and to father two beautiful daughters, but in his thirties, he died of cancer. My mother and father attended the funeral--I was living in another state at the time--and my mother recounted later to me how Choo-Choo's mother, Patsy Dyer, came up to her to tell her how much Choo-Choo had liked me when we were teenagers. I told all of this to Mary-Margaret.
"You can't throw those letters away!" Mary-Margaret exclaimed.
"Of course, I won't," I said.
And so I placed Choo-Choo's hastily scrawled, partly rhymed letters back into the file cabinets with all those other items with which I can't bear to part. I've given my children directions to burn everything when I die.
But I bet they won't.
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