The Crate

[dr_pretentious]

It was a standard unit of volume in my undergraduate life: big enough to fill a Vassar crate. The guys in Facilities and Operations built them by the hundreds over the course of the year, so students could store their things over the summer. No crate, no storage. They were cheap and durable, big enough for most of what we weren't taking home with us, and small enough that even I could lift one fully packed, as long as I filled it with something other than books or papers. It was perfect for its function. It was the Platonic form of the quality of crate-ness.

The day before graduation, I dumped all my papers and notebooks, my correspondence, copies of student publications my writing had been published in, computer manuals, and a few books into the crate, and my very patient father hauled it out to the car. The crate came south with me to my parents' house in Rockville, and then across town to the group house where Dan and I were housemates, where he and I started dating again. Dan carried the crate to the U-Haul truck when we moved up to Jersey for grad school, and then again when we got a nicer apartment across the river, and yet again when we bought our house.

Where it sat on the front porch for seven years.

Not that I'd done anything with its contents at any point since graduation.

From time to time, I'd open the crate and think to myself, "I really ought to sort that stuff and file whatever's worth keeping." But there were student papers to grade, there was a dissertation to finish, there were dishes in the sink, and eventually there was fiction to write. I would have had to believe, if only for a few hours, that emptying the crate was more pressing than those other things. I'm just not that good at lying to myself. I use writing to procrastinate about household chores, not vice versa. So the crate gathered dust, and a vigorous population of spiders, and presumably a vigorous population of whatever the spiders were eating.

From time to time, Dan would say, "Will you, for gods' sake, deal with that fucking crate?" Which was a very reasonable question, expletive included. After all, he was the person likeliest to end up schlepping the thing anytime we moved. We have some vague notion of moving back to the DC area at some point in the next five years, and considering that the crate spent about FIFTEEN YEARS with its contents undisturbed by human hands, it wasn't hard to imagine that it might spend five more years slowly decaying on the porch.

Fortunately(?) our porch is decaying faster than the crate is. The previous owners of our house were big do-it-yourself fanatics, with more enthusiasm than skill. The porch looked great when we bought the place, but it turns out the sellers used indoor paint on it, which did exactly nothing to protect the tongue-and-groove porch floor from the elements.

Once it became clear that we were going to hire contractors to build us a new porch, I finally had to do something with that crate. If the coming of the contractors hadn't been enough, the rapid approach of my 15th year college reunion, which Dan has used to good wisecracking advantage, was a bit of a motivator, too. So last week I spent a couple of days with a dust mask on, sorting through the things I thought were important in 1992. And quite a few things still are. I found several issues of the campus women's paper--fjm and cthulhia and I were in the editorial collective together. fjm and I became friends mostly by disagreeing about fine points of feminism. I turned up a big bundle of letters from radiotelescope, including an account of his first week as an undergrad. The character sheets from the various gaming campaigns of those years were scattered around in the crate, as were cthulhia's whimsical illustrations of our party's adventures. And photographs! My goodness, everyone's glasses frames were really large in the early 90s. There my sister and I are on a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice. There my summer housemates and I are in our commencement robes.

And I found the handful of cards and letters Dan sent me between our high school courtship and our post-college courtship, during the years when we imagined we were just friends.

Most alarmingly, I found a whole lot of official college paperwork that had my social security number. For seven years out on the porch, with no padlock on it, that crate had every piece of information anyone would have needed to steal my identity. Apparently no one thought to look. Either that, or the spiders scared them off.

Anyhow, the recyclables are recycled, the shredables are shredded, and the rest is in my study, waiting for me to file it. It's difficult to persuade myself that filing is an urgent task. All my treasures are safely bundled up in a couple of small plastic milk crates. They're very durable plastic milk crates that have served us well since we moved out of Highland Park. The very Platonic form of the quality of milk-crate-ness, even.

Comments

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Oh, *that* story I still tell to anybody who thinks that the Myers-Briggs personality profile is a good way to assign roommates.