The first chapter: Where minimalism and memories collide


     I picked up another item from the dusty box. It was a thin, ½-inch, blue notebook. I opened it and inside were pages and pages of different colored movie ticket stubs stapled to lined, notebook pages. There were easily 40-50 movie stubs stapled to each side of each page. You know the old movie tickets, where you go to the movie theater and the theater attendant has an enormous roll of tickets. They tear one off for you as your proof to enter into the movie world of your choice.

     I paged through, glancing at all the movie stubs carefully lined up. Each page brought a fresh whiff of a musty odor. The idea that my late husband had painstakingly collected these movie tickets and stapled them symmetrically in rows and rows and put them together in this notebook--the time he spent on it, attending the movies, collecting and meticulously stapling. The incredible number of hours he dedicated to something he loved.

     It was nothing but old movie tickets in a notebook to the outsider. Absolutely no meaning to anyone else and after almost 30 years of marriage, all it meant to me, the widow, was a smile remembering how much he enjoyed those movies. I know my husband lovingly and meticulously added all the stubs onto these pages--Oh the pride he must have had in the sheer number of stubs in that notebook! I wonder if he showed his friends his notebook? His parents? His brother?

     The notebook was packed in a box that was dusty and badly damaged. It had sat in a damp basement for decades, and the box had a musty smell and remnants of dead spiders and webs. It was not a box fit for a king; it was more like a box of forgotten memories.

     We had carried that box with us from an Iowa basement to an Illinois basement. In Washington, Illinois, it sat about eight years in the basement until we moved to the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. There it sat in three different apartments over a four-year period of time.

     Then one October morning, complications from knee surgery took him from me.

     Several months later I sat in my empty apartment with this box and many others like it, filled with HIS childhood memories.

     As much as I wanted the notebook to mean something to me, something that would convince me to continue to carry this box--and others like it--with me to the next chapter of my life, sadly, it did not. The weight of all those unknown memories crushing me.

     I threw the notebook away.

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