In a college town, the end of classes vivisects the community. Connections are broken and entire social structures collapse upon themselves, only to be spontaneously rebuilt in the fall. In the meantime, those students left behind often feel themselves crushed under the weight of connections that snap instantly and fly back in their faces.
I am one of them this summer, at least for the month of June. Nearly everyone I know in Eugene is gone and the town seems dead because of it. I am disconnected--I try to reach out and touch someone, but feel myself grasping only warm, muggy air. It's easy to forget I am even part of the human race at all, to feel that even if a tree fell in the woods and I heard it, it still would go down as silent.
But reassurance appears in the strangest of places and yesterday, that was in a pair of heavy cardboard boxes stored behind my cousin's house. They contained the personal affects left by her grandmother and her parents decided to sift through them with my help.
Virginia O'Connell, who left the boxes behind when she died, is not a blood relative of mine. Her son, Ken, married my mother's first cousin, Gwyn, and their daughter lived in the house where the boxes were stored. Looking through them now was strange since she died long ago--I didn't, despite my journalistic instincts, ask Ken how long ago she had died or why we were only looking now.
But I was glad they had waited because it gave me a chance to see what was inside the boxes. Virginia was a hoarder, like nearly everyone on my mother's side of the family. She kept not just fine silver spoons and crystal bowls, but detritus as well.
At one point, we unearthed a stack of coupons for five cent discounts on laundry detergent. The profoundest thing about history is that its grandeur is not what strikes you. Its mundanity is what strikes you. I felt the dust of history staining my fingertips as I held this coupon in my hand.
I could see so clearly, despite not knowing what she looked like, Virginia O'Connell clipping it, saving it, and forgetting about it. It was so mundane, so commonplace, so unremarkable. I was struck by how different from my life hers wasn't.
And yet, I couldn't imagine a five-cent discount on anything being worth the effort these days, and I was struck by what a fundamental, but still unremarkable difference that was.
As we sifted further, I we turned up more oddities. There was a post card from 1911 with a black-and-white photo of a parade float labeled "The Coming of the White Man." There were old oatmeal boxes full of check duplicates. There were unsent pieces of business reply mail from before the advent of the ZIP Code.
There were also objects of profound value. The first thing Ken found was a box of his childhood marbles, which he displayed to me, pouring them out one-by-one into a teacup and giving me the battle history of each grizzled bead.
"This was my steely." he said, dropping an incongruously lusterless metal ball into the cup. "I won a lot of matches with this guy."
Suddenly, I didn't feel so disconnected from everything. I had started the day feeling as though I had no connection to the entire human race, as if it did not even exist for me. Now, I was looking into Ken's face and seeing him reliving so many games played and won on sidewalks and wood floors across the West of the United States, fifty-some years ago.
I suddenly felt as though the entire history of the human race, across time and distance, was something I could hold, was holding, in my bare hands a that very moment. And I dove into Virginia O'Connell's suitcase of letters with relish.
Midway through the searching, I uncovered a folded piece of card stock with a simple poem typewritten on it. I handed it to Ken, asking who wrote it.
He took it from me, began to read aloud--"How do we know he was our father?"--before stopping, realizing what it was.
He said he had written it in 1963, the year his father died.
"He was the one who carved the turkey on Thanksgiving" was one of the answers, which I have quoted inexactly. For some reason, that was the one that got me. I imagined the emptiness the O'Connells must have felt that Thanksgiving when someone else had to carve the bird.
Ken and I stood in his daughter's driveway, staring at the poem, for a good minute. I'm not a fan of homespun, or even industrially fabricated, sentimentality, but it got to me. Tears welled up inside of me.
"Ken, put that down and let's get on with sorting," said Gwyn, sitting impatiently by a pile of letters. That was nice of her. It probably saved both of us from the embarrassment of tears.
And when I went home, despite Eugene's emptiness, I didn't feel so alone anymore.
