~a column by Colleen O’Brien
About once a month I attack one box of attic stuff to see if I need to keep any of it. It takes all afternoon to go through a box because I have to touch everything, read everything make a decision on everything. By the time I’m done, all of those everythings are right back in the box where they belong. I’m not making any progress, but I am enjoying the time travel.
The latest box I chose to inspect contained grade school and high school memorabilia. It’s eerie how easily I assume the persona of me awkwardly growing up. Just by studying a few photos and report cards, I’m quickly looking out of her eyes, feeling her feelings. I’m Collie at 9 dressed as an angel for the First Communion of 8-year-olds. In the photo I am looking at fellow angel Kathleen out of the corner of my eye as we stand behind the communion rail, a place we’ve never been. I am impressed with myself, allowed to stand where only altar boys have gone. Kathleen and I are trying very hard not to laugh. We know we’re in trouble, but the laughing–in–church helplessness is upon us and we can’t rescue ourselves even in the face of sure damnation.
In a flash I see myself on another day at St. Joseph’s. I am much younger, probably kindergarten, and I am aware of the bells being rung from the altar. I can clearly see that it is Bobby Boyle, altar boy, who is ringing them. Prior to that morning, I’d thought it was God. Beginnings of doubt.
But I remain holy: the next thing I see in the box is a bag; it is full of holy things — holy cards, holy medals, scapulars, rosary beads, a vial of holy water, a missal. And there, my nun doll. I was the only one I knew who had one. I never undressed her.
Next is the canvas Blue Bird bag with my Blue Bird alias, Wah Hee Nah. Saying the name aloud brings up a weird flush of embarrassment, and I remember why: at recess Margo and I are ostentatiously calling one another by our Indian names (thinking we are clever and mysterious) when the boys ran past yelling, “Oh, you stupid Blue Birds!” I lose my intense passion for Blue Bird lore after that, although I remain a Bird, probably because my mother makes me, and I do wander through Camp Fire Girlhood for a brief while.
The little bag is crammed with notes passed in class, so it’s probably around sixth grade. My favorite note, one I have never forgotten, is still there: “Don’t look now but he’s staring at you!” I did, he was, and he winked. Red letter day in my life, and I recall it with the heart-flipping joy of that long-ago moment.
How can I be so old and so young all at once?
The next cache is the stack of report cards — years of them. Grade school is pretty much straight “S’s”, for Satisfactory. Junior high and high school are not. Erratic might be the term, for instead of the perennial praise for apple-polisher Colleen, now it’s notes like this on the bottom of each report: “Typing isn’t always easy — as you know — but with continued work it will come.” Apparently my typing teacher was unaware that Frank who sat in front of me liked to turn around during speed tests and shove my paper roller back to beginning position. There are quite a few teacherly messages of “Slowed down”, “Coasted last nine weeks”, “Not working as she did last term”, “Alertness in class would help.” Really, I had forgotten. All of my life I told people what a little Goody Two-Shoes I was during my student career.
Next is the high school scrapbook. There are the class photos, all horrible of me until I get to be a senior and Mr. Mick Finn takes a finally decent, posed photo. I don’t read the newspaper clips of the winning games posted faithfully in the book, only the yellowed articles about marching band and pep rallies. There are lots of photos of teenage girls in pajamas and giant hair rollers at slumber parties. A few candids of us at the pool. Post cards from friends gone away for the summer. Sophomore servers and the juniors decorating the gym for the prom. Then my own prom, sitting in a convertible with an orange headscarf to match my orange prom dress. It’s a truly ugly ensemble, but at the time I thought I was a “Seventeen Magazine” model. The scrapbook is a wealth of American adolescence during an easy era in a small town. Those years appear to me now as a combination of vitality and lassitude, worldliness and innocence that I used to think was purely American but is probably just purely adolescent.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once wrote “High school’s closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.” This might have been true for him and me; I don’t know about now, since I’m thankfully not in high school. I hope it is for today’s teens.
The box is full of as much uncertainty as it is good times. Kinda like now, I think, as I close it up, retape it and put it back in a closet.
