There Was Everything.
My recent outburst about Shane and Dylan not having any meaningful memorabilia in their own homes was directed entirely at Shane, since Dylan is at college. They’d both been asked to do a school project about a meaningful item – and they’d both chosen food at their grandparents’ house.
“There has to be something in your own house that has meaning to you!” I shrilled.
Shane said repeatedly, while I was screeching, that if he’d had more time, he would almost certainly have been able to find something with value in his very own room.
Having seen Shane’s bedroom, and heard his excuses, I doubted he’d have found anything. But an hour later, I found a pile of stuff in the hallway, outside of my bedroom door. There were nine specially chosen items, with a note handwritten in pencil, in Shane’s unique scrawl. It said:
Stuff I got from you in this house that I would’ve totally picked over a gift card if I had more/any time to look
There was not just “something” with meaning. There was everything.
There was a poster with Shane’s preschool face enlarged in its center, surrounded by adjectives that described Shane: angelic, careful, lovable, fast, sweet, intelligent – and two dozen more. There was his all-time favorite book of bedtime stories, written so long ago that I’d read them when I was a child. There was an antique Fisher Price toy, a video game, a Gameboy, a CD set of his favorite Christian radio show.
Then there was a photo frame that said “Me and My Big Brother” – a gift to me when Shane was born – with their first photo together. On one end of the pile of stuff was his very first stuffed pug – the one he got in place of a real one – and on the other end was his well-worn ping pong racquet, rough around the edges from all the paddling.
I looked at the pile, so neatly arranged, and realized that Shane’s understanding of sentimental value is even better than mine. He not only has a slew of things he loves and values, but he found them from every chunk of his young life, and put them together like a work of art that described his very essence.
Sure, there’s probably plenty more in which he finds meaning. And yes, he did his creative writing paper based on a gift card because he forgot to think about the assignment when he was at home. But in a few short minutes, Shane showed me that he knows – he understands the value in his childhood possessions.
And he showed me that I should never have doubted him at all.