Yesterday, after much procrastination, I finally exhumed the casket containing all the stories I wrote up through the early-1990s. Much of the stuff I penned in elementary school is lost, but from about eighth grade on, I think I probably have everything, except perhaps two or three items, including one particularly twisted opus about a killer robot that generated enough notoriety that I suspect it was probably stolen by one of my classmates. The box has literally not been opened for decades.
The primary reason for its neglect, at least at first, is largely emotional. There are a lot of memories tied up in these creations. Some people keep journals; I wrote stories. And each one of them is like a snapshot or a home movie, in that it conjures all sorts of associations. The few journals that I did start are there, too, but invariably I’d either get too convoluted, or I’d write them as if they were intended for someone else – some future reader – so that soon the entire enterprise would become more work and less fun than writing proper fiction. I wish I had kept even a book of lists or simple observations for each day, as I’m sure it would have been enough, in some cases, to sharpen my memories. I’ve been able to recall so much simply from related notes and marginalia.
Of course, my handwriting (including my signature) has undergone so many changes over the years that I wind up doing a doubletake, from time to time, wondering at first if I am the true author of some of these items. But aside from a few comparable treasures from friends, I most certainly am.
The other reason I have avoided going back is that opening any folder in this vessel is a guaranteed time-sucker. Every story, every script, every cartoon, comic, or fragment is an invitation to amusement, but also, sporadically, to embarrassment and inexhaustible nostalgia. It’s bound to be an absorbing business, and I was hesitant to be consumed.
The impetus for my finally digging it out, after a quarter of a century, is my having reconnected with my cousin, with whom I had not spoken in probably 35 years. Growing up, he and I were like extraterrestrials in the family, both of us imaginative, creative, and artistically inclined. Like me, he was always involved in some project or another, and our regular exchange of stories helped fuel our mutual productivity. He was also instrumental in furthering my interest in classical music.
There was a lot of a cross-fertilization going on there, as we stole gleefully from one another. But we were already raiding the same sources of inspiration – popular movies, current events, writers we were reading in school, and abundant autobiographical material. Interestingly, we never had a falling out over creative issues. It was only later, when we started to get interested in girls, that we began to get competitive. Or at least I did. The result was that, by the time we graduated from our rival high schools, we really didn’t have all that much to do with one another.
I tried to reach out to him a couple of times within the past 15 years or so, but it was only through the diplomacy of a mutual friend – with whom I’d also lost touch for 30-some years, until we reconnected on Facebook – that peace has been brokered. So we are now talking again, by telephone (he is married and living with his family halfway across the country), and the conversations have been epic, most recently pushing three hours.
He has been in a similar situation, where all of his writing for the past few decades has been in the service of work. But lately he has had a hankering to return to the kind of freewheeling fiction we both wrote when we were younger. So he set himself a challenge. And around the turn of the year, I received a very impressive piece of work. Somehow, he’s been able to recapture that youthful joie de vivre. It was like reading something we might have written circa 1980, only rendered with the mastery of an adult. Since then, he tells me, he’s written another 190 pages. So the gauntlet has been thrown!
Whatever the motivation, like St. John’s Lamb, I have now broken the seal – literally, as the box was wrapped in packing tape. Who knows what thunderings, lightning, and earthquakes will come of it.
