Surplus Cats

October is passing quickly and so goes my last scramble to move out of the Hobo Alley apartment. I keep finding things that I’m not even sure how I’ve managed to hold onto through years of annual moves. And then, completely unexpected, a bit of the past found me.

The subject line read, “J. K. sent you a message on Facebook.”

“What?”

It said the same thing on the second read. And the third.

“Wait –No!” I’m not usually in the habit of talking to my inbox. The potentially dead aren’t in the habit of contacting me from beyond-the-potential-grave, either. My high school friends, especially the friends from the Philly years, reside in my memories in three categories: Probably Alive, Certainly Not Alive, Likely Dead. After my family moved, when calls home to Skillz had no new reports on our missing friend, I figured like so many people I knew, he was gone too. (This is not commentary on my friend, but on the overwhelming sadness of those years of my life.)

The good news is that my friend is very much alive. The bad news is that I’ve been too busy with the move to sit down and continue proper communication continuation. I have managed to get back in touch with Skillz, to bring him up to speed on these latest, most happy, tidings. We’re the sort who can maintain non-disjointed dialogue no matter how erratic the gaps in our conversations tracks are from year to year. I’m hoping that December brings enough of a slow-down for picking up some of these ties I’ve neglected. Correspondence has never been something I’ve done well with.

This has been the month of reminiscence; while assisting with preparations for her move to Vermont, Mom finally got me to confront the bins in the basement filled with my childhood things.

I found a box of old black and white marble composition books filled with tortured sentences straining to fit all of a week’s spelling words into one questionable line, and a mimeographed form letter from a teacher informing my parents that Elizabeth has been (check box) very good, did very well on his/her book report and (check box) played nicely with the other children this week. I found the adorable soft bodied black baby doll that upset my first grade friend Kelly’s sense of right and wrong or whatever. (I kept this doll in the glass cabinet with the fragile dolls I wasn’t to play with, because I felt she was too nice to crush in bed, but I remember taking her out of the cabinet and hugging her often. Like the special dolls, she didn’t have a name. In my five-year-old logic, once you name something it’s too real to keep behind glass.) An army of stuffed animals, a high school jacket, a few caps and gowns, awards, and a ton of personal ephemera in the form of notes passed in class to ticket stubs from Greyhounds, movies and shows. A menagerie of good times and terrible times all stowed away in a cardboard ark.

Another box held an entire parallel unexplored world in the form of photo albums I’ve never seen –or, as Mom insists –do not remember; the past reaching out and asserting itself, saying “These are the strangers you came from” and humanizing my biological father with snapshots he sent to Mom from Vietnam.

It’s been quite a month, and November promises to be similar. I’ll be driving to Vermont, following D in the moving truck. I haven’t really driven much in the past eight or so years after selling my car when I moved to Los Angeles. But everything old is new again, it seems, and survival is what we do.