Shoe Boxes

               

 There is a song by my favorite singer and songwriter, Jack Johnson, with a line that describes the nostalgia of physically kept memories perfectly: “Our dreams… are made out of real things, like a shoe box of memories with sepia-toned lovin’.” Shoe boxes are made for more than a pair of brand new shoes.

Inspiration can come in many forms. For me, my inspiration to write seems to come from memories – whether they happened yesterday or ten years ago, or they are physical things like shoelaces, ticket stubs, and picture frames, or whether they live as a moment frozen in time within my mind.  I love to collect things. Things like a green pen, a broken piece of guitar, or an eraser with little notes written in pen all over the surface would mean nothing to the average person; but to me, they are pieces, fragments of memories long gone.

I have at least five different shoe boxes, each with their own purpose. One contains letters, pictures, and scraps from my year in New Zealand. One contains memories from grade school all the way up until high school. Another contains a few dried roses, letters, cards, and more, collected over a period of two and a half years with my boyfriend. A bigger shoe box contains most of my snow globes I have carefully collected over a span of ten years. And my fifth one is a miscellaneous collection from places, events, pictures from various people, scraps of paper with written notes; an arbitrary assortment of things.

I’d like to believe I inherited my habit of collecting and saving little things from both my mother and my grandmother. In this way, it has become somewhat of a tradition that keeps on spreading from generation to generation. When I think of tradition, Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof comes to my mind. Swaying his hips as his tassels swish at his sides, his arms raised up at his sides snapping to the beat, "Traditionnn! Tradition!" In many cases, tradition was and is like a fiddler on the roof in my life as well. It follows me wherever I go, its song reminds me of who I am, and even though there are days I want to bang on my roof and tell him to be quiet and go away, it is still there - through silence, through sad songs and songs of celebration.

My mom has saved cards from my five year old birthday, newspaper clippings from my fourth grade science fair, my sister’s cast from when she broke her ankle at one year old, even snippets of hair from her children’s first haircuts. My grandma Bonny, my mom’s mom, went so far as to reuse plastic Ziploc baggies, and she saved toys, blankets, and bonnets from her children’s childhood. 

My grandma clung to traditions. Big or small, she loved them. Things like making popcorn balls every autumn, watching Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman with Fresca and popcorn, wearing your best lipstick no matter how the day goes, and making oyster stew every Christmas are now woven with nostalgia into my life. Even during stretches of months where the patchwork quilt of my life was fraying at the seams, those threads of memories and tradition held the separate patches together. My grandma rubbed off on me in that way. If she were still alive, I could picture us watching re-runs of Touched by an Angel eating popcorn and sliced green apples, crying with a box of tissues in front of each of us.

I suppose I have a sixth shoe box, a metaphorical one where those memories that can’t be held or touched in the physical sense are packed carefully away. They are evoked by a song, a smell, a comment from a friend, and soon I am unpacking that shoe box once more to play over the memories in my head like a slow moving feature film.

Shoe boxes are indeed made for more than a brand new pair of shoes. They hold things, they cherish things, and they somehow keep memories alive despite the mismatched conglomeration of things strewn together in one, tiny, cardboard box. To the beholder, they are not just boxes of stuff or junk but rather, boxes full of people dear to them. And those things, those bits and pieces of memories are really just bits and pieces of dreams and people.