Skeletons From My Closet

I have a "writer's closet" in my office at home.  It is a dark, dank, and very frightening place.  This past week I took to rummaging around in there, digging up old bones.  I made some interesting finds.  (See my two previous blogs.)

This closet contains pieces of my life that I have all but forgotten about.  For example, I also dug up two old novels--fully completed--some 700 pages of material.  I wrote both of these more than twenty years ago and I haven't got the guts to read them.  As far as I'm concerned I buried these years ago and sealed them in cement.

I also discovered a stack of old stories--dozens and dozens of them.  I pulled a few of these that might hold some promise with revision.  Most of these stories were written on a Tandy 1000, dual 4 1/2 floppy computer and a daisy wheel printer with Pika font # 12.

I also found two guitars: an electric Ovation with dual humbuckers (a classic worth money now) and an Alvarez, thin-body acoustic with electrical hookup.  I haven't played guitar for five years now, but took it up last night and by, golly, I could still rock (well, sort of).  If I got my calluses back and limbered up my fingers a bit more, I'd be decent.

And finally I discovered my trove of 26,000 baseball cards, including several entire sets from the early 1990's and one unopened box of 1987 Topps (rookie year of Jose Canseco and Mark McGuire) complete with bubble gum sticks still intact inside the unopened packs.  I had hoped to pass all of these along to my son, but he has no interest in baseball at all (and I have very little).  These will continue to moulder in the closet for another generation.  Only God knows how many Mickey Mantles and Willie Mays cards are parked inside those massive boxes.

My closet is cleaned now.  No skeletons.  And I even created a new niche for some of my current bones.  I'm still filling those spaces with new writing.  Twenty years from now, one of my descendants may find me there . . . .laid to rest.