By the time we had Willie tucked in over at the assisted living side of the Temple of Doom, it was Christmas.
And I was exhausted.
Exhausted from weeks of clearing out Willie’s apartment. Exhausted from another broken Christmas.
So Willie’s pile of folders packed with newspaper clippings, cards, detritus — I couldn’t deal.
I threw them in our home office. For months, they hung out with the caribou antlers.
Is the home office the right place for caribou antlers?
I don’t know.
I have a book called How to Clean Your Room. I read it dozens of times when I was a kid.
Yes, dozens of times.
How to Clean Your Room doesn’t spell out exactly where caribou antlers belong.
That my husband decided the office was the best place for them feels wrong. But I don’t know what the right space is.
So I gave the caribou antlers a roommate.
As spring warmed away the gloom of Christmas, I felt ready to tackle those folders.
The first thing I found in the folders was a black-and-white photo of Indy. It’s formal — a school picture maybe. He’s young in the picture, sporting a black bow tie and white jacket.
The back of the photo reads “New Haven, Connecticut.”
Um, hi.
Indy was never in Connecticut.
“That man,” my husband said when I showed him the picture, “was an onion.”
Next, I found two wedding invitations from 1961 — long before my parents met.
Both belonged to Indy.
Who are these people? Indy never mentioned them. Although, to be fair, Indy never mentioned a lot of stuff.
“I want to go to a Marine Corps reunion in Tennessee,” Indy told Willie once.
“Why?” Willie asked. “You were never in Tennessee!”
“I was for a bit,” Indy said.
Willie demanded to know why, decades into their marriage, she was just getting this information.
“You never asked,” Indy shrugged.
I found a newspaper article from the Camp Lejeune Globe, where Indy gives his theory on voting.
“I think everybody should vote,” Indy says. “That’s what America was founded on. It is one of our freedoms — the secret ballot. In order to keep this freedom, I believe everybody should vote. It’s the only way to get anything done in the government. But if people don’t vote, they have no right to complain about what the government does.”
Huh.
That is the most words I have ever known Indy to say.
See “You never asked,” above.
I could write paragraphs as long as Indy’s voting theory about the contents of those folders. Invitations to Marine Corps celebrations and Willie’s pile of high school honor roll certificates. Willie’s honor society welcome pack and a 24-page newsletter from the bank she worked at in 1968.
The folders held Willie’s recipes. Famous ones, like her chocolate chip cookies and pumpkin bread. Gross ones, like beef skillet fiesta, which I assure you is a dish with roughly the appearance, texture, and appeal of vomit.
Each of the four folders had a recipe for zesty flounder.
How good could zesty flounder possibly be? It’s flounder.
Also, I grew up with Willie’s cooking. Willie wouldn’t know zesty if it asked her to go to a Marine Corps reunion in Tennessee.
I found a pile of newspaper clippings announcing Willie and Indy’s engagement. A Malaysian check Indy wrote to cash in 1960. The title to Indy’s Studebaker. A receipt for a Winchester.
“When did Indy own a gun?!” I asked.
“I don’t know,” my husband said. “But I do know that you never asked him if he owned a gun.”
I found a letter Indy’s mother wrote to him on April 17, 1960. Fourteen years from that day, Indy would cradle a four-day-old me in our dining room, where Willie had just changed my diaper.
On the dining room table.
Because with nine months lead time, Indy and Willie conducted zero preparation for my arrival.
I mean, I filed for my own birth certificate at the age of 28 because Indy and Willie never got around to it.
The folders also held letters Indy wrote to Willie.
No. I didn’t read them. I have learned from horrid, horrid experience to never read letters exchanged between your parents.
Listen, there’s a reason they’re your parents. And the mechanics that created you are spelled out in those letters, I promise you.
As I explored each folder, the contents stopped being “detritus.” They became snapshots from my parents’ lives. Before they were my parents. Before they were them. Things I never knew, moments I didn’t experience.
It also became clear Indy and Willie never read How to Clean Your Room, which states memorabilia is to go in albums or boxes.
Not folders.
And that’s why I had to read How to Clean Your Room so many times.
Somebody had to.
And that’s why those mementos, those moments from Indy and Willie’s youth, are safely tucked away in a banker’s box in my storeroom.
They’re treasures.
Even the zesty flounder.
