The Obligation to Collect
03.22.08 By Collin DavidI keep a scrapbook, but I didn’t always. I started to tape unimportant scraps of papers and receipts and tickets to things into a plain ol’ inglorious composition notebook about two years ago, when I suddenly realized that time was flying by and I had almost nothing to show for it. Heck, I barely even remembered anything happening for at least a year, and this from a guy who’s never touched a memory-damaging substance - so I decided to chronicle the proof. You know, just to have something to refer to when someone eventually asks me, “Where were you on the night of…?” I like to avoid unjust incrimination whenever possible. Also, just incrimination.
During my cleaning frenzy, I’ve come across a few artifacts that are supposed to have an amazing sentimentality for me, but only serve to conjure discomfort and a little bit of bile. For example, a cheap memorial glass from my senior prom.
As far as proms go, my school dropped the ball. It was a heavy ball, and it landed on the toes of every senior, which were broken and eventually turned gangrenous and had to be removed by the school nurse, who was equipped with only a hammer and a butter knife. This is my recollection of my high school, which sagely put the potentially toxic art and chemistry classrooms in windowless, airless cells at the center of the building. When an alarmingly large percentage of the teaching staff were found to have brain tumors, no one acted that surprised.
So, I have this glass, inscribed with the date of the prom and a cute little picture. The venue was grungy, and food was sub-par, it was expensive, and we had an unbearably bad DJ instead of a live band. The girl I attended prom with and I went to college together before she ran away to France, but not before having her own romantic adventures moments after we broke up, and calling me up at my friends’ dorm rooms while I played GoldenEye, pestering me to ‘come home’. These are not warm memories, but the prom cup remains on my desk. This is for two reasons.
First of all, it provides an excellent perch for my Madman action figure. And second, I feel obligated to keep it, for the same reason I’m obligated to carry around prayer cards from the funerals of dead relatives and bits of evidence from car accidents. These are negative mementos, so why do we keep them?
The best that I can come up with is that they’re important things, even if they don’t make us feel great. We are, if nothing else, the sum of all of these things. I still keep a large, wooden box of gifts and cute little things that my last girlfriend and I exchanged and I can’t yet see parting with. Years later, after we refused to talk to each other, and began talking to each other again, I was helping her clean her apartment and found a wooden box of things that I’d given her. We’re not talking again now, because that’s how these things go, but I hope that we both still have our boxes. It was almost seem morally offensive to discard anything so intensely personal. If I ever get an organ or limb removed, you can bet I’m going to ask for it in a plastic baggie. My dentist almost seemed grossed out when I asked him if I could have my surgically-removed wisdom tooth. It just seemed natural to me. I keep things.
So, this swollen, painful, obtrusive wisdom tooth of a glass from my senior prom probably isn’t long for this world, but it’s been a difficult decision to make. I have a black & white polaroid of my and my once-beloved all dressed up and ready to be punched in the face by prom disappointment, and it’s more evidence than I need. It takes up less space, and it doesn’t convey any fake-cute sentiments. And helpfully, writing so much about that fateful glass is helping me in the process of getting rid of it. I mean really, we didn’t even dance when ‘Moondance’ came over the tinny speakers. That song has ‘dance’ in the title. One is contractually obligated to dance to it. Well, that and ‘Rock Lobster’. What, they didn’t make you sign the contract?
I’m not that sentimental, but there are some things that need to stick around, whether we like it or not.
(And I encourage you to comment below about things that you’ve carried around for years and don’t particularly enjoy having!)
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Article Tags: glass, prom================
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March 25th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
“Whether we like it or not.”
I’ll admit, I’m pretty sure I tossed a few of my school annuals in moving. You know, the few that wouldn’t fit in the box… And book boxes are so heavy. But I can’t give up books I have read and will actually read read again, so the annuals seemed disposable. At the time.