July 18, 2002

"What is the point of a bottom drawer?" I question Kathleen. "To save things for the future," she says promptly.
What would I put in my bottom drawer if I had one? Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson (p. 278)

My 'bottom drawer' is scattered through the office at home, contained in boxes that litter the shelves in the closet and in the office proper. I've saved many things from my past, be they books or pictures or letters or poems and stories I've written. So many of them have been packed away for so long, I forget what they look like or how they read. It will be good, once we're in the house, to go through all these memory filled boxes and recall the chapters in my life they were party to. I will then be able to determine what particular items I would put in the bottom drawer. Some of the obvious choices are:

All the letters Lisa wrote to me during the two years we maintained a long distance relationship. I was in Toronto attending DeVry; she was in St. Catharines still living at home. We would talk on the phone 2 or 3 times a week. Every month or so, one of us would make the trip on the Grey Coach bus down the Queen Elizabeth Way to spend a weekend together. In between the calls and the visits, when we had each other burning on the brain, we would take the time to write each other letters. Sometimes Lisa would scent hers with her perfume and give my nose a treat when I opened the envelope. Those letters still carry a faint scent even now, some 15 years after they were written.

Pictures of all the cats I've had in my life. They have been my best friends, my children, my pride, my greatest source of amusement, my greatest source of heartfelt loss. I cannot imagine ever again living without cats; they bring so much to my life.

The ticket stub to The Smiths concert (With Billy Bragg opening) that I went to in June 1985 with my then-girlfriend Karen and a large contingent of Gord's Place friends. If one single item can summarily recall a specific time of my life that was full of adventure, of change, of youthful exuberance, of new beginnings, of lost opportunities, of what might have been, of what no longer exists, that stub would be it. The concert was at the Kingswood Music Theatre in Canada's Wonderland just north of Toronto. The bunch of us made a full day of it. We arrived at 10:00am and spent the day cruising the rides, gorging on fast food, and soaking up the sun. As the day stretched into the early evening, we made our way to the grass at the Music Theatre and experienced the concert. During the post-midnight drive home, Karen was so exhausted from the day that she fell asleep in the crook of my arm. It was a perfect day, and the best day of the month that Karen and I were together. If there is any day in my pre-Lisa life that I could go back and relive, that would be the one.

Photographs of me as a child, taken in every place that I lived. I'd like to have pictorial evidence of all the times I moved growing up. Most of the photos are at my Moms or still in the possession of Dads wife. I can see them in my mind's eye as clear as day. There's me, age 18 months, standing in the yard of the pmq in Victoria, holding the garden hose and getting soaked, all the while smiling and being a ham. Age 6, middle of winter, bundled in a head-to-toe snowsuit, sitting with Duffy atop The Rock that stood not far from the pmq in Gander. Standing on the pink sands of a Bermuda beach, a coral formation in the background, my 8 year old self looking quite handsome in the breeze.

Every poem I ever wrote. The good ones, the bad ones. Those incomplete, those immature. The epic tales, the tiniest snippets. Indecipherable hand-written and computer printout. The earliest. The most recent. (Why, that would be yesterday's.)

I'm sure there is much more memorabilia that given careful thought and review I could store there. However, a drawer only has so much space to stuff things into. Time to buy more furniture.

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