Box of wonders

For those of you who may have heard me tell the story and thought I was making it all up, here's the proof.

Yesterday I went digging around in a big cardboard box stashed in a corner of the basement. I hadn't opened this box in a couple of decades. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find this picture and a lot of other things inside.

My high school diploma was in there. My university diploma was lost in an apartment flood many years ago and I never bothered to replace it.

Also inside the box was my old Miami-Dade police crime scene press ID and my ID card from when I interned at the governor of Georgia's office. I looked so young and so serious.

There was a 1981 Sugar Bowl program. That was Georgia's only national championship in football (so far) and it happened my senior year. How sweet.

I found the abortive first bit of a manuscript I started, abandoned and then forgot. From the bit of it I read last night, it was about a pro basketball team that was about to be sold. I'm not sure when I wrote it or where the story was going, but the couple of pages I glanced at were atrocious.

There were two Sigma Pi fraternity paddles.

There were hundreds of my old clippings from my days as a newspaper reporter. They were yellowed and brittle after all these years and made the whole box smell a little funky.

I opened an album of wedding pictures from my first marriage, and that put a damper on the proceedings for a minute or two.

There were several pieces of hate mail from my newspaper days that I had saved for some reason. This was back in the days when people had to type or hand write their mail. It was a lot more work than firing off an e-mail, and I was surprised at how much trouble people went through to tell me how much they detested me. You guys hardly ever send me hate messages and I kind of miss them.

I found a letter informing me about a journalism award I had won. I didn't remember that particular award, so it was like winning it all over again. Yay me! It's kind of funny that I had forgotten the award--it's not like I had a pile of them to remember.

There was a chunk of old lead type that was obsolete before I began my newspaper days but I liberated from a forgotten closet at the newspaper. This chunk of type was a comic strip.

There were plenty of other things in that box of wonders, but I won't bore you with a full inventory.

Cool stuff. I wonder what I'll think of the collection when I open the box again twenty years from now.