Wednesday, 4/12

Okay, nothing about the weather or weather-related problems today (especially because the sun's out and everything's melting). Instead, I've started to wonder--is the door still around?

It’s amazing the things that pop into your head while running. While out Saturday morning I ran past a house being remodeled. One of the things the contractor had sitting out in the front yard was an old set of cabinets. I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but as soon as I saw the cabinets I immediately flashed back to a day over 25 years ago and a place 400 miles away.

It was, to say the least, weird.

As many of you know, my first job out of college was at a TV station in Flint. The first two months I was there I actually lived in Flint itself, but as I discovered the things that led me to give the city the nickname of “The Pus-Filled Pimple on the Hairy Butt of the Universe”, I ended up moving out to Flushing. Flushing had its own unique, uhm, quirks, but I ended up staying there until I came to my senses and moved back to Marquette. The entire time I lived in Flushing I lived in one apartment. And it was to that apartment that I had my very strange flashback Saturday.

Inside the door of one of the cabinets in that apartment was basically a wall of graffiti. Every person who had lived in that apartment since, if I remember correctly, the early 1950s had written down their name, when they lived there, and one or two things that happened while they inhabited that space. I thought it was kind of an interesting concept; the last day I myself lived there, I added my little two cents to the on-going conversation, and they immediately proceeded to forget about it until Saturday.

I have no idea who moved into the apartment after me. I have no idea if the house that contained the apartment even still exists, as I’ve never found a reason (or the interest) to go back to Flushing since leaving. In fact, in all honesty, I don’t even remember the address of the building, other than it was 139-some street. So I have no idea if the people who lived there in the past 25+ years kept writing on the cabinet door. I have no idea if the cabinet door is even still there, or people who owned the house put in new ones and tossed the old ones with 30-some years of written history on door. As far as I know, the cabinet door ended up like the one I saw while running Saturday, tossed on someone’s front yard bound for a landfill.

I just don’t know.

If the cabinet door is still in that apartment, though, I wonder if the current tenants have ever looked at it, and pondered the stories left by people who’d lived there over what’s now the past 50 or 60 years. Some of them are probably dead by now; others, I’m sure, have moved on to (hopefully) bigger & better things. I know I myself was kind of curious the first time I read the door, which is why I felt compelled to add my two cents worth when I moved out. But whether my two cents are still around for others to read; well, I have no idea about that.

Like I said, I hadn’t thought about the cabinet door since the day I left that apartment over 25 years ago, and I have another cabinet door, here in Marquette, to thank for bringing it back into my head. That makes me wonder. . .

What else is hidden in that strange brain of mine, just waiting for the right trigger to bring it back into my consciousness? The mind’s an amazing thing, isn’t it?

(jim@wmqt.com)