This week’s list of treasures/artifacts nearly lost to the lawn mower: one small rubber lizard and one small rubber frog from the dollar store; one piece of orange sidewalk chalk; one non-functioning squirt gun; one hand trowel; one spark plug gap gauge (i.e., “space money”); one Matchbox Corvette (lucky save); one Hot Wheels “highly modified and stylized” school bus (Hot Wheels … would have happily mowed over it); multiple “favorite stones.” A pet peeve I share with my wife is a yard cluttered with the detritus of the day’s joyous chaos — the inevitable evidence left after two little explorers/spacemen/bad guys/Jedi/firemen/policemen have run roughshod over the property — so this was a somewhat unusual yield.
I sigh with frustration when I nearly mow over these treasures, not because I am afraid my Briggs & Stratton might be threatened by an encounter with any of them, but because I remember the strange combination of jealous attachment and fickle abandonment that accompanied similar treasures when I and my friends were young. In fact, I recently had the weird experience of not only putting my hands on some of those forgotten treasures, but also passing some of them along to Sam and Luke. This weekend we helped my folks clear out their attic in preparation for their impending move. I spent a sweaty, spidery, uncomfortable hour in the attic followed by a six-hour hike down Memory Lane. Here, preserved undisturbed for 30 years, were the possessions I treasured enough to carefully entomb in the attic when I was still a child. For my kids, it represented quite a haul: As I type this, I’m glancing over at a Ziplock bag containing Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Boba Fett, and one hapless unnamed stormtrooper — a length of string still firmly tied around his waist, his terrible yet well-deserved last moments spent dangling over the source of some no-doubt horrific demise frozen forever in time. There were hundreds of Topps Star Wars trading cards — harvested from untold numbers of hot summer-day walks to Kim’s Rexall to buy bubblegum packs. There was the big box full of Legos — the revelation of which elicited an actual gasp of surprised shock from my oldest son and some sort of “ecstatic collapse” upon his grandparents’ floor (promptly mimicked in slow motion by my younger son) — that still contained several fully realized space fighters carefully sculpted by yours truly when Ronald Reagan was our new president. There were notes written in the language my best friend James and I invented; pins and coins; birthday cards from my great grandma; diaries and first love letters; bullet casings and “No Hunting” signs from the farm in Michigan; that big bowie knife my grandpa bought me over the protests of my mother; a forged ring and length of chain unearthed at an abandoned farm; countless railroad spikes found along the tracks behind the house; a rusted horseshoe unearthed at a Boys Brigade sleepover behind our church in South Holland; and on and on.
And then of course there was the actual treasure box: A little wooden chest bought as a souvenir on a vacation to King’s Island, containing the absolute cream of the crop. When I was a child, the box and its contents were so important, I wrapped it in bicycle chain and secured it with a padlock. Here were all the objects that one little boy treasured above all else. Seeing them now was vaguely touching — my grown-up brain now able to connect dots and make connections that I was then unaware of. Here was a toy stopwatch, given to me by my father: When I was very young, I spent an extended period of time in the hospital with pneumonia and a terrible pancreatic infection. It was touch and go. The day I was finally released, while my mom was wading through paperwork, my dad hoisted my still weak body up into his arms, took me to the hospital gift shop and asked me if there was anything I would like. I was fascinated by watches and stopwatches — still am, actually — and I was fixated on a particular toy stopwatch behind the counter. “Are you sure?” my dad asked. “That’s not a real stopwatch, you know. It’s tin and plastic.” I didn’t realize it then, but I know now he was happily prepared to buy his surviving son an actual, honest-to-goodness stopwatch. But I wanted that toy stopwatch, and so I had it. When I lifted it out of my treasure box on Saturday — and you need to trust me when I say I’m not adding this for dramatic effect — I’ll be damned if the thing didn’t start ticking away loudly when I thumbed the start switch.
There was a jumble of keys, each one a story. One skeleton key was unearthed while digging in the backyard of our corner house in Riverdale. I was delighted when it happily engaged the lock of our heavy oak door. I was doubtful, by my great-grandmother encouraged me to give it a try. It was like magic. I still remember the way she smiled when the tumblers clicked. Several of the keys came from my Uncle Gil, who knew I loved keys, and would produce one or two of them upon every visit to our house. I was a shy boy, but Uncle Gil would make a point at the beginning of every visit to crouch down to look me in the eye, and carefully display and explain each key — what it was for; how it was used; how he came to be in possession of it; what he liked about it; why someone would want a key for its given purpose. I didn’t know a lot about Uncle Gil, but I knew he had fought in the Philippines in World War II, and that he never talked about it, and that I should never ask him about it. Uncle Gil never had any kids of his own, but he sure was a great uncle. In fact, all my uncles were great, and I’m thankful for my own kids’ uncles — every crazy one of them. Most of my keys came from uncles, most with a story. There were keys in the box from other sources: Some from old cars we sold; others from the old house; others found while playing in the yard or in the park. But all the keys from my uncles are together on one ring, a separate ring.
There was a chunk of fool’s gold, a vestige of one of the many vacations my family took with my best friend’s family. We were in Cuba, Missouri, and the walkways were literally paved with fool’s gold. James and I thought it was fantastic. Our dads patiently indulged us as we gathered literal buckets full of the stuff. Not only did we collect these buckets during our time there, but we actually carted them home. At the campground where we were staying, they would show Yogi Bear cartoons just after dusk. One night, while we were waiting for the cartoons to begin, my dad and I saw a fireball streak across the sky. My dad said that was a piece of a rock that had been flying around in space for thousands of years that was burning up in our atmosphere. I was awestruck. For years these buckets of fools’ gold remained in my parnets’ garage. Years ago, I had chosen the most brilliant specimen and sequestered it in my treasure box.
There was a pair of cufflinks and a tie bar my father gave me — no doubt around the time cufflinks and tie bars were going out of style; a piece of gunflint unearthed at the Tippecanoe Battlefield near Lafayette, Indiana; a 4H pin from my dad’s days on the farm; Indian head pennies rationed out by my Grandma Bink over the years; my first pocket knife; a ring with my birthstone in it; a resin-embalmed scorpion given to me by my aunt and uncle who moved to Arizona back in the 70s.
I watch my sons play together, and I instantly recognize the shorthand of their love and their interaction. There’s something about boys that leads them to talismans or totems … treasures … little altars built to their conquests and discoveries. I have a sister — who I love dearly, and who I happily played with on countless summer days. My childhood neighborhood was bereft of male companions, so I made do with my sister and her friends. But our play was in some ways always negotiated: We’ll play house, but only if I get to take off Ken’s head and pretend he’s the Headless Horseman; we’ll play Batman, but only if he’s happily married to Barbie and has a baby. But there’s just something about brothers and the mischief they make and the treasures they uncover … I wasn’t born with a brother, and so I had to find one. His name is James, and we have been of one mind for a long, long time. Our play never involved negotiation: We innately knew that the Lego vehicles we spent 30 minutes carefully crafting and engineering in silence were going to meet their fate crashing against the side of the oven from atop the stairs; we knew that, while camping, we were going to wake up at the crack of dawn with the unspoken mission to conjure the previous night’s fire from nothing but ashes and cooling embers, armed only with our breath and a few dry leaves. When I was crazy, wreckless and wandering with a stupid, broken heart, the Spirit moved and gave James the grace of his dead dad’s gun collection and the wisdom to drive me to Beecher to shoot shotguns at empty paint cans and pumpkins. That’s the way it works. As old as we get, it never leaves. It’s a weird, undefined thing … call it the Holy Spirit moving over the face of the deep. I see it when Luke is scared, and Sam drops every treasure he owns in that moment to the ground to rush to his brother’s side.
