Deep in the Psyche of a Writer
I’m not really sentimental. I don’t keep every drawing my children have made me while really little. I’ve kept my first mother’s day present. A foot imprint of my daughter who was under a year. My son’s first “turkey” hand print in school. Booties. Hospital hats from the first hours of their life, but really not much else.*Personally I think keeping a child’s teeth is gross.*
Yet, I still have my Smith-Corona typewriter. I wrote Love Unexpected, my first novel, on it. I still have a few typewritten pages of that trainwreck. Of course I’m looking deep inside my mind because the anniversary of when I first started writing is coming up.
Yet, I think keeping those keepsakes is more than being sentimental. Yes, those pages, the typewriter, is very sentimental. At the same time I can never recreate those first moments so why keep those reminders? Why, for the love that is all and holy, do I still have a copy of my heavily revised first novel saved on my computer?
Today I’m going to settle on touchstones instead of sentimental value. “Look at how far you’ve come.” or “This is really who you are. You are willing to write on a typewriter if it means getting words to a page.”
Heck, I don’t know, but I think more than anything this mystery of why I keep these things is reason enough to keep them. Does that make sense?
All this is compared to how I tossed my first couch out to the trash can at the first sign of new ones. Yes, I paid 100 bucks for those blue, beautiful pieces. 3 years of wear and tear I was over them. I pushed one that was still in very good shape into my son’s room. The other I sweated, and labored it out to the trash can without a backward glance.
Anyway, what have you kept? What are things that you use as touchstones? What’s sentimental to you?
I’m really enjoying your website! I stop by frequently looking for new posts.
As for a response to the subject at hand…I still own terrifically ugly set of KMart dishes purchased for my first apartment in 1997. Several years later, boxed up for a move, they were mistakenly left atop my Oldsmobile. After traveling nearly two miles, the frantic gestures of the elderly couple in the vehicle stopped next to mine at a light got my attention. I pulled over immediately and removed the miraculously unscathed dishes safely to the backseat. After years of informing my husband that no, he cannot throw THAT box away during spring cleaning because those dishes are magical SURVIVOR dishes representing a youthful independant me, he has finally given up.
Oh, that is a wonderful story. 2 miles and they didn’t fall off, okay those are SURVIVOR dishes.
It’s funny the things we keep, or things that have value to us. I have kids so I don’t think dishes would fall on my list. *none of mine are survivors* At the same time a person in my generation wouldn’t have ever needed to use a typewriter, let alone keep one.
All these things makes us beautifully human, and unique, all with some type of story to tell. Thank you for sharing a little bit of yours.
I still have every last piece of writing I’ve done, with the exception of some college papers and some high school writing I lost somewhere along the line. It took me years to put some of it on the computer from the hundreds of pages of hard copies I had, but it’s all here, sitting on the hard drive of this computer. I even keep old drafts of work. I don’t see why I shouldn’t.
How sentimental am I? I still have the roses I took from the spray off my Grandmother’s casket 2 years ago, they’ve been sitting on my dvd player since the afternoon of her funeral. I have a stuffed animal given to me 2 days after I was born. I still have a ringlet from my dog (poodles shed ringlets) in a locket in my jewelry box. The same locket I wore all through high school simply because the boy I really really liked loved to open it (the hair wasn’t in it at the time).
There is no rhyme or reason to what we find worth keeping. Something touches a piece of our hearts and souls and from then on letting go is hard.
Great post, Mel
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I still have my old Smith-Corona, too!
I’ve kept odd collections of things–notes of encouragement from good friends, trinkets my son and husband gave me that remind me of them, quotes that came my way at a critical time. My little boy gave me a quarter for “good luck” right before the ‘07 GH ceremony. I kept it with me throughout the event and it’s still sitting on my desk…
Don’t tell anyone but I’m a sentimental old fool. I still have some of the kids baby clothes and some of their school stuff as well as Christmas ornaments they made when they were little. After mom died, when we were cleaning out the house, I stole an ENTIRE box of photos–sadly, I was afraid since Dad was going to remarry that I’d never get any so I just took them. Five years later not a word has been said so it’s not like he missed them LOL