My parents and brother drove down from CT to visit us for the holidays, and my dad told me he was bringing a small box of my old stuff with them. When they arrived, I took the box to the garage, not paying much attention to it. From the items I saw on top – my college fraternity paddle and an old ABC Sports banner – I assumed it was the typical ephemera that might have been found in my old bedroom. Nothing notable.
A few days ago, after straightening up some items in the garage, I thought to take a closer look in this box. Curiously, beneath the paddle and the banner, were several items I’d never seen before. I did recognize an old book, “A Dictionary of Symbols”, that was in a cardboard sleeve, typical of the casings my grandfather would construct to hold many of his books. Everything else was unexpected: a folder full of stencils, pages torn from old design magazines explaining methods of drafting charts and graphs, a watercolor swatchbook, oil pastels, and technical pens. The pens look slightly more modern, and the pastels may have been my mom’s, but the stencils and magazine pages surely would have been tools my grandfather had gathered to aid in his graphic design work. These artifacts conjured feelings and images of a time long past, when the craft of design involved painstaking rendering, and careful hand work. In an industry that has been completely transformed by the rendering power of the computer, and again by the communications revolution of the internet, these items seem prehistoric. It was dizzying.
It was a pleasant surprise to find, and I must remember to thank my parents for dumping that “box of old stuff” here.
