Memory Lane is the new awesome

One of the subtle hints your parents might give you to let you know that you shouldn't ever plan on moving back in with them is destroying your childhood bedroom. I'm not talking just putting a new bedspread on the bed and calling it the "guest room" ... but actually tearing down walls. Over the weekend I found myself in LA dedicating most of my time there cleaning out my childhood bedroom so that they could take down the wall that divided the upstairs and turn the two small rooms back into one large cushy family room.

I got right to work unearthing artifacts of my teenage years. I spent hours sorting through old photos and marveling at the superb sense of style my friends had in the 80's, trying on old cheerleading outfits and tacky velvet prom dresses with the matching dyed satin shoes, reading love letters from old boyfriends (all of whom are married with several children by now), discovering evidence of a strange obsession with small, cutesy frog figurines...

and painful attempts at art from my time as an aspiring oil painter...

as well as finding old relics from my college days...

It was amazing to me how every little thing in that room had a flood of memories attached to it, and it made it really difficult to throw anything away.

The highlight was probably the time capsule that we had hidden inside the wall 20 years ago when we had it constructed in the first place. We knocked some premature holes in the wall until we found the little box that my 11 year old self had filled with things that I thought that "people in the future" would want to know about.

There were my favorite cartoon shaped erasers, a pair of my old eyeglasses, an article from the newspaper announcing the big earthquake that had just happened in San Francisco and some pages torn out of a JC Penny catalog, which I considered the epitome of fashion at the time.

I had also written a note to explain the time capsule, and obviously not having much of a concept for how soon we would be tearing that wall down, wrote "Hello future generations. By the time you read this, I will probably be dead."

I managed to keep about 3 boxes of memories, and as I left, I turned to my parents and in my best Reagan to Gorbachev voice said, "Mom and Dad, tear down this wall."

It's the end of an era.