This Box of Old Things

Photo from YMCA of the Rockies, Estes Park, Colorado

As I write this, I am in Estes Park, Colorado. My son does online school through Wilson Hill Academy. My daughter also attended Wilson Hill. Over the years, we have enjoyed the Christ-centered focus, the loving culture, and the depth of education Wilson Hill offers. Each year, Wilson Hill hosts an in-person gathering so students, teachers, and families can have a little face time. This event is often held in Estes Park, a place surrounded by the stunning scenery of the Rocky Mountains.

Each morning of the event starts with a chapel time. While waiting for worship to begin, a slide show of all the graduating seniors plays. As I looked at each name and face, I remembered the thrill of expectation and potential that pumped through my veins at that age. I don’t think I would be wrong to say I saw that in each face that appeared in the slide show.

Expectation and potential are separated from reality by quite a gap. Things never turn out as we imagine. Some fall short of expectations and potential, some exceed them. Most of us live with a complicated mix somewhere in the middle. All of this reminded me of a poem in my last book, The Anonymity of Waiting entitled, “This Box of Old Things.” It seemed apropos to share as I reflect on school, graduation, and the fact that very few if any of us live a life we planned.

This Box of Old Things

This box of old things I run across
(while looking through the shed
for something else)
is more full than I’d like.
Its cardboard sides are distended and crumpled,
as if the contents could spill
any minute
from a ruptured corner.

I decide to go through it
to see if I can let go 
of anything.

On top is a report card showing straight As
and a letter awarding me a Rotary scholarship
for a piano composition that was 
(in their words) “beyond your years.”

Underneath, there’s the yearbook 
from my senior year of high school.
I flip through page after page
of faces looking into the void,
not seeing me or the future I inhabit.
I find my picture; 
my hair was longer and larger
around my face than now.
I imagined it then as the powdered wig
that would grant me a place
beside a bust of Mozart or Bach.

I tuck the report card and letter 
in the yearbook and place it
on other yearbooks stacked 
like tomes of forgotten prophecy.

Between the yearbooks and the side of the box 
is an envelope of photos.
There’s one of my dad, 
now dead for 14 years, 
taken just after he found out
he had cancer.
Under a ball cap that says,
We Be Jammin’,
he looks right at the camera,
saying goodbye with his eyes
as he smiles through a grizzled beard.

I rummage through other corners of the box,
finding a waffle-weave baby blanket in tatters,
a 10 year pin from my social services job
(the 15 year pin is somewhere in my office),
and other relics.
But it’s all the same; it’s all stuff 
I don’t know what to do with,
so I carry it with me
place to place,
year to year,
and keep it

packed away.