From the look of it, you would think that keeping notes from high school and college in boxes in a closet would be a guaranteed way to avoid forgetting all the information they contain. Unfortunately, sifting through all these notes today, it becomes clear that there is no guarantee besides frequent use, and I clearly don't use chemistry, US and European history, or German enough to remember anything beyond the basics. All these papers have done is weigh down the closet floor and make getting to fallen clothing incredibly difficult.
There were a few memories mixed in with them, though, that I had to keep. The postcard we bought in Gibraltar to commemorate the nice bite-marks a Barbary ape left in my arm while we were there ("Thinking of You," it reads, above a picture of an ape). Yearbooks from high school. A diploma or two. And an autobiography I started in middle school, called "My (Boring) Life." This one is my favorite of the lot. It begins with a very serious introduction, explaining the motivation behind such an autobiography: "As a child, I had always had a keen imagination, but could never get anything down on paper. I decided I could only write a biography of some sort and I have decided to try it." There are lists of friends (subdivided into bestest, best, great, good, and okay), lists of careers I'd considered, lists of places I'd been, not so nice commentary about a few siblings, and some real gems of insight into my slightly arrogant twelve-year-old self. Reading over it again almost fifteen years later, I can only laugh...and hope that, should I ever write a real autobiography, it reads better than this one and gives my brothers and sisters a little more credit.
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