Full circle

There are certain moments in life that you never forget. One such moment, for me, was a phone call in autumn 1993, at my apartment in west Philly. A year earlier, my first wife, Stephanie, and I had moved up to Carlisle (my hometown) from Washington DC; the previous four years, she'd pursued her undergrad studies at American University while I worked at whatever job I could to pay our bills. It was a rough marriage: we were both immature, with issues that we took out on each other, verbally and physically. It should have ended much sooner than it did, but when it ended was when we made the move to PA: she went to her mother's house and stayed there, and we were done. I felt cheated and robbed and betrayed: I'd helped to put her through school; now it was my turn (part of the plan in the move was that she'd work while I got my teaching licensure) and she was gone.

We were both big babies, acting like big babies. It was a bad time, bad relationship, bad all around.

When we moved back to Carlisle, we didn't take everything we owned along with us. A lot of our furniture and other belongings were in a $50-a-month space in Alexandria, VA, at American Self Storage. I kept up on the payments for a couple months, until Steph said that she and her family would go down and get our stuff some weekend. In the meantime, I sent her checks to pay for the storage, which I got back, endorsed by her and signed over to a guy she had met and would eventually marry.

So the storage was taken care of. I thought.

On that autumn night in 1993, though, about a year after we made our move and I'd last seen her, the phone conversation eventually came around to the storage. "Well," I said, thinking of the backs of the cancelled checks with Steph's PAY TO THE ORDER OF (Strange New Man) and then, underneath, (Strange New Man)'s signature, "you got the checks I sent you for the storage, right?"

"What checks for the storage?"

"The checks I sent you. To pay for the storage."

"I thought you were paying the storage."

In that moment, I realized that I'd lost it. Boxes and boxes of my history: journals... notebooks... letters from family and friends and girls I'd had crushes on... books... records... my moon globe that my parents got me when Apollo 11 landed and that I'd had in my bedroom as a kid... furniture that had been handed down to me... my high school yearbooks... all gone.

There was silence while we both processed what she was saying, and realized what it meant.

I asked her why she thought I'd sent her checks for the EXACT AMOUNT OF THE STORAGE if they weren't for the storage.

"I just thought you were sending me money" was the answer.

And then "You mean all my stuff is gone?"

So now it was About Her, and not in a Well I guess I really fucked this up for both of us way, either. Screaming and shouting ensued--one last marital argument, for old time's sake--and she hung up on me.

And from there...

The last 15 years have not been easy. I've felt, in many ways, like I've been climbing out of a dark hole. There have been good moments, but that conversation with Steph was like the last straw, the last numbing moment of five years of hell with her. In many ways, I've been reeling, numb, and trying to recover ever since. It's only really been in the past two or three years that I've finally started to shake all of it and come out into the light, so to speak: finished a novel, got my masters, and now, finally, have decided to move to Vermont because it feels right... it feels like where I need to be.

So...

Two weekends ago, at my 25th high school reunion picnic, a bunch of my classmates and I were talking about old yearbooks, and I mentioned offhand "Well, I don't have my yearbooks anymore..." and Sherri, one of my classmates, said, sort of incredulously, "HOW do you lose your yearbooks?"

"Well," I said, "let me TELL you how: you put all of your high school and college things into a shared storage space with your wife... then you break up with her... and you send her money to help pay for the storage, which she doesn't keep up on... and the next thing you know, they're cleaning out the space and your stuff is gone."

Before Sherri could even say "Awwww..." (I could tell she felt bad, but she's not really an AWWWW type!), Sally, another of our classmates, said "You know, they sell copies of our yearbook at Bedford Street Antiques downtown."

"Really?"

"Yeah. They're only, like, twenty-five bucks. They have all different years. My mom was class of '49 and we got hers there. But, yeah, they have both our junior and senior yearbooks there... around twenty-five bucks."

I didn't have time to get over to Bedford Street Antiques before they closed that afternoon, but I told my Mom and Dad about the shop, and asked them if they could go down and see...

... and today when I came home from work, there was a big padded white envelope stuck in my mailbox. I tore the top of the mailer open: a familiar book from 25 years ago...

1982 ORACLE, the green letters on the white cover read. My senior year high school yearbook... no signatures... pristine.

How fitting that I would get a clean copy of my long-lost senior yearbook back at a time when I'm preparing to move to a new state, to start a new life.

I feel like a 15-year-old curse has been lifted... that a cycle of darkness that began around the time of that phone call has come full circle and has finally ended.

Maybe next I'll get my hands on another moon globe.