Has it ever been three o’clock in the morning, and you’ve found yourself awake, suddenly, with the image of your favorite childhood toy in mind, or that crazy fringed and silver-studded belt you bought in college, and you have this feeling that it’s still with you, packed in some box in the back of a closet? If asked before, you would have answered immediately, assuming that item was long gone. That your brain had forgotten it because your body had.
I just pushed a folding chair into one of my basement closets, climbed up, and stuck my hand, blindly, into a tub that I knew was filled with my small supply of markers and construction paper. Supplies I don’t use on a daily basis, but find useful when friends’ kids visit, or I feel like leaving my sweetie an old-fashioned valentine.
Immediately my hand found the object that I had suddenly suspected I still owned, despite not having looked at it in years.
It’s a gray plastic box with a plastic hinge and some ridges on the bottom, as though it might need traction at some point. Other than its size—like a pack of 3 x 5 index cards—and that it lies flat instead of standing up, it is of the same material and construction as those plastic recipe-card holders one can buy at the grocery store. But inside:
An amazing set of miniature office supplies, each nestled in a soft foam cutout. I’ve always loved office supplies, even as a kid. I must have gotten this set twenty years ago. My mother doesn’t remember it, so it couldn’t have come from a family member.
The foam is a little firmer than I remember, when I push on it with the tip of my finger, but it hasn’t discolored or started to crumble.
There’s a plastic vial of glue—or there was. I just shook it and found nothing left.
There are a tiny pair of scissors, the size kindergarteners use; a tiny stapler; a round white eraser, still supple, with the word ERASER professionally printed on it, the only branding I can find anywhere on or in the box.
In the other half of the box, a spool of tape, complete with a toothy ledge with which to cut a piece off, nestles in a carefully formed tape-spool shape; a paper cutter; a pocket-sized tape measure that stretches to thirty-eight and a half inches; and three tiny compartments, covered by a removable four-inch ruler, one filled with five plastic Gem paper clips, one with staples, and one with two push pins and five rubber bands, which still stretch, but I wouldn’t trust their limits.
I know that I’m looking at a complete set—I remember just looking, repeatedly, at the box of delights, but never bearing to use any of it, even a small portion, even one paper clip, one swipe of the eraser. The glue, the one thing missing, must have evaporated.
I definitely grew up a pack rat—it’s in my genes—but I’ve gotten better, and a few years ago, I went through my childhood bedroom and threw away or gave away most things. Next to my high school yearbooks and the bundles of letters sent to me long before e-mail, which survived the purge, this box of office supplies is an oddity. Sure, I love a good mini-stapler as much as the next obsessed personality, but I remember that I didn’t keep the set of three heart erasers, and I stuffed the handful of number two, pastel-paint-coated pencils in my parents’ pen-and-pencil jar near the telephone rather than adding them to my “to keep” suitcase.
I have a vague sense that a good childhood friend gave me this small plastic box, and that may be why I kept it. That it reminds me of a glimmer of happiness and connection—that some kid would think to give another kid such a thing.
I’ll put this miniature treasure chest back in its storage tub with the much less important but equally little used bottles of Elmer’s and Styrofoam trays of chalk. The next time I need to plan out a booth at a convention, I’ll call on the memory of a handy little measuring tape, and that the next time I misspell a word in my latest piece of writing, I’ll think of that tiny eraser, as white and as round as an aspirin.
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