We're packing to move. For the next two weeks, maybe longer, I will not write. I will sort through the stuff I've saved for years. I'll get rid of some of it. A lot has already gone--to Goodwill, to the library, to consignment. I have vowed that I will be brutally efficient. I will not get bogged down in sentiment. But I have failed already.
There is a two-drawer chest on my desk into which I toss odds and ends: business cards of people I barely remember, stamps that cost 29 cents, dried-out markers and glu-stiks. There is also a little bowl in which I once tossed a couple of old bracelets, one with an award I won in high school, the other one a silver ID bracelet tarnished to black. I can make out the engraved initials: H.V.M. That was my father. On the reverse, with a flourish of leaves, L.B.
There is no date, but it must have been about 1930. Dad had gotten a job in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was an engineer who should have been an actor, a writer, a singer. But he had done the practical thing, and now he was working for the phone company and acting in community theater--leading man roles. [His picture is on MY LIFE page.] His leading lady was Lavinia Buckwalter. I know, because I read the critics' reviews in his scrapbook. She was crazy about him. I know this, because I once found her letters. I don't know how he felt about her, but I do know that within a couple of years he left Harrisburg for Lewistown, where he met Sara Knepp. Her picture is on the MY LIFE page, too. And he kept the bracelet.
And now, some 90 years later, I sit here at my desk, wondering what to do with that bracelet. For now, I'll pack it.
There is a two-drawer chest on my desk into which I toss odds and ends: business cards of people I barely remember, stamps that cost 29 cents, dried-out markers and glu-stiks. There is also a little bowl in which I once tossed a couple of old bracelets, one with an award I won in high school, the other one a silver ID bracelet tarnished to black. I can make out the engraved initials: H.V.M. That was my father. On the reverse, with a flourish of leaves, L.B.
There is no date, but it must have been about 1930. Dad had gotten a job in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was an engineer who should have been an actor, a writer, a singer. But he had done the practical thing, and now he was working for the phone company and acting in community theater--leading man roles. [His picture is on MY LIFE page.] His leading lady was Lavinia Buckwalter. I know, because I read the critics' reviews in his scrapbook. She was crazy about him. I know this, because I once found her letters. I don't know how he felt about her, but I do know that within a couple of years he left Harrisburg for Lewistown, where he met Sara Knepp. Her picture is on the MY LIFE page, too. And he kept the bracelet.
And now, some 90 years later, I sit here at my desk, wondering what to do with that bracelet. For now, I'll pack it.