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In the fall of 2005, I had just moved into a new apartment, and I was finally living alone for the first time in my life. It's strange to think that I had gone straight from home to an Army barracks to a college dorm and then to an apartment with my girlfriend-fiancée-wife. And that sad fall when my wife and I were getting a divorce, I was finally in my own place, a place I shared with no one - no bunk beds, no communal bathroom, no mess hall, and no one to annoy me or for me to annoy. I'd never really had so much time on my hands and a place to truly call my own. With so much time to myself, I began to take stock of what was left in my life. So I got out my old shoebox of stuff and took a look inside.

You must understand that I am - practically by definition - a packrat. I am a person who doesn't throw away anything unless absolutely necessary. That's not to say that I don't take out the trash or get rid of rotten fruit. No, I know real trash when I see it, but I don't always know when it's time to let go of something that I no longer need. As a child, like most small boys I put things in my pockets - which my mother (and later my grandmother) dutifully removed from my pockets before or after doing laundry. I liked to pick up mechanical things like wires and nuts and bolts and flanges and screws and small pipes and rusted tools. I also held onto things I got whenever we traveled, or things I received as hand-me-downs from my grandparents. As I got older, the "obsession" changed a bit, so I held onto other types of things - letters from old girlfriends, some of my Army stuff, old cameras, duck decoys, and every program to every stage show I have ever seen or been involved with. (For the record, that's over 200 programs.) Smaller things end up in that large shoebox that I call the "stuff box." Every few years, I purge the stuff box, weeding out the things that truly no longer matter to me.

The oldest thing in the stuff box is probably my great-grandmother's childhood cap gun. It was once nickel-plated, but now it's got rust in a few places. It's a little single-shot pistol with a cup-shaped thing to hold the cap in place. The trigger spring still works, and I remember firing caps in this little pistol once I got it home from Great-grandma's place. After a while I put it away, and so there it is. I suppose I must have been rather attached to it for it to have lasted through thirty years of purging the stuff boxes.

Here's another gem: a slightly-worn kid-sized postcard booklet from Disneyland from probably 1968 or '69. There was no Disneyworld in Florida then, just Disneyland in California, and the big highlight was the Matterhorn roller coaster. I remember riding that coaster and getting hooked on the thrill even then. Later, I rode the Beast at King's Island in Ohio during its inaugural season, and that pretty much spoiled me on roller coasters. (Also in the box: a button I bought right after that ride on the Beast.)

Ah, an oldie-but-goodie: my patch from the North Orange County (California) Scout-O-Rama in 1970. My Cub Scout career was rather short, but it did last long enough for me to visit the Anaheim Convention Center with several thousand other Boy Scouts from Southern California. I remember I sewed that patch (along with several others) onto a jean jacket I wore while stationed in West Germany in 1982. The jacket is long gone, but the patch remains.

Here are DeLand's Automatic Playing Cards, which I bought in the Magic Shop at Disneyland in...let me see...1972? The cards are tapered and marked. If you see me pull out a blue box of cards, don't play poker with me.

And here is my old slide rule. Growing up in the days before pocket calculators with trig functions and programmable whatever, you came to appreciate the work of the great scientists of the 20th Century who worked almost exclusively with slide rules. I don't know why I kept the darn thing. Perhaps it's to remind me of my days as a math whiz.

Here's an old brass padlock that says "Old Glory" on the side in a waving flag. It's probably as old as the cap-gun, but I found it in a barn behind an old house we moved into when I was a teenager. It turns out that you can actually open it with any Master-Lock key from the 1970's. No, I don't use that lock on anything these days.

Speaking of patches, here are the old name patches from my camouflage Army uniforms, as well as the brass and medals from my dress uniform. And in a special box all its own is my Army Achievement Medal. I've got the actual certificate in a trunk somewhere - probably with all those theatre programs.

Here's a "worry stone" given to me by a customer at my old store in Virginia. Miss Miller was one of the finest little old ladies to ever grace this world, and she gave me this deep brown, highly-polished stone because it matched my eyes. It also happens to fit my hand pretty well, so I can rub it while I worry about trivial things.

Finally, here is the thing that set me off on this little trip down memory lane: a hand-cast aluminum cross given to me by my friend Bill in seventh grade. While I was taking Drafting class with Mr. Lee, Bill was in Shop class, learning how to make all sorts of cool things. When it came time to do some simple aluminum casting, Bill made a couple of pocket-sized crosses 2½" tall by 1¼" across with arms about 3/8" square. It was pretty roughly finished when Bill gave it to me, but I immediately set to work with some sandpaper to smooth it down a bit. I always thought one day I'd drill a hole through the top so I could wear it, but I never did.

Why would Bill give me such a thing? Because Bill and I got into a fight just after we met, and once we got past the "new kid" thing, we got along really well. Bill gave me the cross to make up for knocking me down. Even then I remember thinking that it was kind of an odd gift for one guy to give another, and I don't know if Bill even remembers giving it to me now. We hung out together for a few months after that, but I drifted into one circle of friends and he into another, and by high school we hardly ever saw each other. At the time, however, I did think it was a neat gift, because it was a true gift of the heart.

Bill and his family were devout Christians, and after he gave me the cross he tried to explain to me - as best a seventh-grader could - the significance of the Cross. Up to then I hadn't been a very constant Christian myself, and so I honestly wasn't sure what he was talking about, but it did intrigue me. I spent a lot of my teen years in the 1970's pursuing some kind of spirituality, and Bill's little cross kept finding its way into my life over and over again. Carried in my pocket for a while and then forgotten on the dresser, the cross eventually found its way into the stuff box.

When I was getting ready to leave for the Army in 1981, I put a lot of boxes into storage down in my grandparents' basement, including the stuff box. Before I left them there, I pulled out that cross and stuck it in my pocket, and there it stayed the whole three years I was in the service. It was a little reminder of home and childhood and - what else? Anyway, it was a comfort to have that with me while I was away from home. When I got out of the Army and retrieved my boxes, the cross stayed in my pocket another year or so and then went back into the stuff box. And there it stayed for the next twenty years.

In the spring of 2005, I had purged the stuff box before moving to a different house. At that time I tossed my old Army SMART manual from Basic Training, a lot of old letters and notebooks and photos, and even a broken calculator. (I don't know why I kept it.) But the things I've mentioned here (and a few more) have stayed, including Bill's cross.

These are the things that matter, the things that have lasted, the artifacts of my life. Like a broken pot found in a 3000-year-old archaeological dig, these things have no real meaning to anyone but me. There are no real memories contained in that potsherd, only a glimpse at someone's life a long time ago. When I look at my artifacts I can see the memories. And I get more than a glimpse at who I have been at various times in my life: I also get a glimpse at who I want to be. I wouldn't have kept these things without some reason, without some hope that by reminding me of my past they might influence my future. And so, as I sat there that night with those artifacts strewn around my desktop, I could see how they might change who I was then.

That fall of 2005, I felt broken and insecure, but I had found Christ, and His love had begun to heal me. I finally understood what Bill had tried to tell me those many years ago, and I knew firsthand the power of the Cross in my own life. For the time being, I put away the Disney memorabilia, the Boy Scout patch, the trick cards, the Army things and the college things and the old lock that didn't really lock. Finally, all that was left was that aluminum cross. I kept that out. It was time to put it back in my pocket again - this time for good.

© 2010 Glenn A. Pettit-Noel

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