OWNING MY PAST, PART ONE

My mom is moving into a new house. To minimize the junk she has to pack, she filled three plastic storage bins with "memorabilia" she thought my sister and brother and I would want to take off her hands — you know, stuff we could add to the accumulation in our own basements.

We're getting to the age where it makes more sense for us — not her — to be the keepers of our keepsakes. Weird.

She gave me my bin about a week ago, and it sat in the trunk of my car until tonight. I didn't have a burning curiosity to see this stuff, frankly — I think I'd rather see my brother's and sister's bins — but I knew there some vinyl records in there and that, with temperatures in the 80s, my car was not the best place for them to be.

So I hauled the bin into my living room this evening. Here are some highlights:

The creature above is my beloved Bippy monster. It has a tag that says "I'm your Bippy." I don't know what a Bippy is or who gave it to me. It was just always on my bed since I was teeny-tiny. Its back is pink with white polka dots. I sort of wonder now whether it was its complete lack of gender that appealed to me. I had scads of frilly dolls, too, but my mom gave those away through the years, realizing perhaps that they didn't mean as much to me as my multicolored monster.

This is apparently the card that identified me in the hospital before I had a name. It's pink because I'm a girl. Notice that it has my religion on it: "Cath." God knows that's some vital information to have on a hospital ID. Does anyone know why they did that?



Here I am in preschool, with some sawed-off kid teeth. This is right around the time my parents were divorcing. My preschool teachers taught me how to say the American Pledge of Allegiance in French. Cool, huh? And very useful, obviously.



Here's a book my mom read to me all the time. It has a lot of those old-school, surreal stories, like people living in shoes and sticking their thumbs in Christmas pies and whatnot. When I pulled it out of the bin, I immediately thought of Ani Difranco's frank assessment of her ex-lover: You make about as much sense as a nursery rhyme.



Here's my kindergarten photo and class picture. My mom was a hairdresser, which I think is obvious from this picture, don't you? Please note that these glasses are the height of fashion today. In the group shot, I'm next to the teacher, the divine Mrs. Litle.





And here is first grade (back row, second from right):



And second grade (back row, second from left):



And third grade (back row, third from left):



You get the picture.

After third grade, my hairdos and glasses were not as bitchin'. Neither was my personality.

At some point, I became a Brownie and decoupaged this picture of myself onto a crappy piece of wood.



I was a hardcore Brownie. Notice in this picture from the newspaper that I (third from right) am one of the few girls in uniform (complete with regulation brown knee socks, which all too many slackers deemed optional). I felt like an awesome police lady every time I put it on. I really needed a holster and sidearm to complement the sweet orange necktie. The journalist in me appreciates the clever headline "Brownies meet."



One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was a Kodak Instamatic camera. The first thing I did was photograph the tree it was under. (Before that, I had a little cardboard box that I had decorated to look like a camera; I had drawn a bunch of images on squares of notebook paper — like of my mom, for example — then I'd point the box at her, say "click," and pull one of the drawings from the top of the "camera" and give it to her. I'm sure this bizarre — and highly Byzantine — game of pretend inspired her to get me an actual camera.)



Later, displaying the same compositional flair, I turned the camera on my family, which boasted — count 'em — three Caucasian afros.