Randomly for a Monday

Just a few random things as my mother was clearing off a shelf:

She found a folder of letters she wrote home before her marriage, and laughed about the letter where she casually mentioned meeting some people from Brown Engineering, naming my dad among others. Then there was a letter when she talked about driving Sammy Davis Jr. around Trinidad. As one does, right? For someone who has lived the last 30 years in Florida, and whose life might seem predictable based on that, her past contains multitudes. (Related: When she tells stories that include the lines "the second time we were in China" or "my luggage was lost for a week when we went to Ethiopia.")

On the same shelf, there was a copy of Columbia magazine from winter 2016, and she asked me if I had any idea why she might have kept it. I flipped through and said, well, this article is about Sarah Sze, and I went to nursery school with her, maybe that was it? Pretty random all the same.

What else? Well, how about a file of printouts of my blog from 2006/7? Yeah, no, I don't know why she printed it, or hole-punched it, or kept it all these years. I think this one can hit the recycle now.

It's possibly even funnier when you look at the holder she reused for it:

Sure, why not?

There was another folder of things related to me, and while I was able to discard my performance reviews from 2005 and 2006, the letters that she wrote to me from Liberia when I was at boarding school are worth a read through.

Another folder was a collection of cards I had sent over the years, holiday and birthday and thank-you notes and the like. This one, from 1979 (so I was 10), was for Valentine's Day:

It reads:

Mummy Dearest,

Roses are Red, 

Violets are Blue,

There's no one I like better than you.

P.S. Except Daddy who I like the same

Don't ask me to explain the art within the heart, I have no clue what I was going for. I can tell you from holding it up to the light that it was cut out from one of my father's business cards, but beyond that? Who can explain the art; not even the artist.

Finally, a few cards showed that my interest in yarn and knitting is long-standing, in case we needed proof of that: