In the Lord Peter Wimsey murder mystery, "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club," Lord Peter insists on seeing books owned by one of primary suspects in the case. He explains this to his great and good friend, Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard when he says, "Books, you know, Charles are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em then we grow out of em' and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."
I thought of this today while continuing my ongoing quest to bring some degree of order to our attic. We moved into this house on Memorial Day weekend of 1977 and we have certainly accumulated enough stuff. My current task is sorting through a lot of Paul's belongings - when he was here at Christmas we reached some general agreement on parameters which I am now implementing and finding some interesting things.
Today, for example, I found a bound copy of his senior English thesis at Bates. The subject was the minor characters in James Joyce's "Ulysses." Of course, I set that aside to share with DT. It's not everyone who has an equal grasp of Shakespeare, Chaucer, the Beowulf poet, Wordsworth and Joyce as DT does. Once he reads it perhaps, DT and Paul can discuss some of the finer points of this enigmatic work.
The main thing I have been going through, however are baseball cards, literally hundreds and hundreds of baseball cards. Of course like everyone else in my generation my parents threw away almost all of my baseball cards helping to create the scarcity that drives up the prices of those cards today. I checked this first with Paul so the purging is all done with his approval. I have to be careful going through the cards because mixed in with his are the few of mine that survived like the 1959 Sandy Koufax card pictured upper right. In addition to the Koufax card I was surprised to find cards for Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Don Drysdale which have to have some value today.
As I was working on this today, I realized that what I am really doing is going through the artifacts of the early years of Paul's life. All those cards, many housed in notebooks and organized in boxes are the tangible evidence of something that was a major priority in his life for a number of years. There's an folk song - "Puff the Magic Dragon" that has a line to the effect - "Dragons live forever, but not so little boys." And just like so many little boys, including myself, Paul is no longer that little boy, but has left these metaphorical lobster shells behind him. They all can't be kept, of course, but getting rid of these things also means getting rid of that evidence and to some extent those memories.
As a result as I go through these things, I do consciously try to save some things, if nothing else to help maintain those memories. Some of the connections like the baseball cards are obvious, but I find other things where only Carol, Paul and/or I might remember the significance. Today in another box of Paul's things, I found an Essex County jurors badge - it took a minute, but then I remembered why it was there. It dates back to one of my first stints on jury duty when he was very young. For some reason he was fascinated by the badge and wanted me to give it to him when I was finished even though you were supposed to turn the badge back in at the end of your time. Of course, I kept the badge and it has been around ever since, I doubt if he remembers how important it was to him all those years ago. So as I go through this process, I am constantly making decisions about what things should be kept - for some reason, the badge wasn't a very difficult decision.
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