» Tuesday, 20 January A.D. 2009
childhood tokens
Quoth What Girls Want, an extended review of the Twilight phenomenon:
One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood. She wants to be both places at once--in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely. And most of all, as girls work all of this out with considerable anguish, they want to be in their rooms, with the doors closed and the declarations posted. The biggest problem for parents of teenage girls is that they never know who is going to come barreling out of that sacred space: the adorable little girl who wants to cuddle, or the hard-eyed young woman who has left it all behind.
I would like to believe that raising adolescent daughters will not involve these wildly moodish females, that somehow the foundation Tricia and I are laying in these years will bear fruit a decade hence. But that's not what I quoted the above passage for. I quoted it for the opening sentence.
The opening sentence rings true in my life, in discussions with my wife about what to keep and what to throw away. I had a protracted discussion over Thanksgiving with my wife, who was horrified that I would so casually consign my high school yearbooks to the trash. My reasoning was that I haven't looked at them in a decade or so...and I don't imagine I'll look at them again anytime soon. Why bother? She maintained that my current and potential future children will get a charge out of a window into their father's former life. After much pleading and enlisting the help of my mother to find a suitable “hiding place”, Tricia saved the weighty tomes of pictures from the scrap heap. Sigh.
However, after going through my few remaining things at my parents' house, I did save a few tokens of childhood, or at least days gone past:
- A Lego Technic F1 race car (along with all my other Legos; the race car was still assembled, though);
- C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy;
- New Worlds: In Search of the Planets, which I hope my daughters will enjoy perusing in later years for the photos and (gasp!) information, despite being somewhat out of date by then;
- A nearly complete collection of Tom Swift, Jr. books 1-30 in decent condition. I think these will probably get sold on Ebay or to Half-Price Books;
- A couple of books by Samuel Delany and A.E. van Vogt (I think);
- A picture of a friend and I from high school (Tricia: “who's this, hmmm?” me: “we were not romantically involved”);
- The coup de grace, although not from my childhood: The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 57, No. 6, Part 2, July-August 1978. Topic? The Unix Time-Sharing System. Win.
Hey, my wife keeps her old baby teeth, yearbooks, and hand-written journals from elementary and middle school, I keep old sci-fi books and technical journals. Seems fair enough to me. (We no longer have the baby teeth, however.)
posted by Nate @ 10:40PM