Old Friends

I haven’t thought about them in years. It’s sad to think that if they hadn’t resurfaced, I wouldn’t have ever thought about them again. I wouldn’t have felt the warmth of their friendship buried within my heart, the reminders of my childhood days spent with them. I could have, and maybe should have, given them away years ago. I could have, and maybe should have, let go of my past after coming to the realization that I had outgrown them, that I no longer needed them around. But even now, with the opportunity to clear them out of my life, I’m choosing to keep them, to cherish them the way they so deserve. I’m choosing to cherish them like old friends.

They’re accumulating on the living room shelves as my father goes through, sorting his from mine. I come home each day to a new library of my favorite childhood books, a new collection of memories surfacing within the archives of my mind. This morning I began to sort through them, clinging to the most valuable of the lot. I glide my hand over the cover of The Night The Toys Came To Life, remembering how I could never close the closet door on my stuffed animals, knowing that when I fell asleep they would need to get out, walk around, stretch their legs if they had them. I didn’t want to leave them locked up. I realize how big my hands have become, how the teddy bear on the cover who used to fit under my index finger can now barely squeeze beneath my thumb. My how time has passed, how much I’ve grown.

Still, when I come across The Night Kitchen, I realize that I can almost recite it by heart. I know it the way a baby knows its mother’s voice, an instinctively attractive force from some unnamed region within the soul. I hadn’t even known that I knew it, hadn’t thought about it since I had placed it away on some unvisited shelf over ten years ago. It’s been sitting there with the rest of the friends I cast away as I moved on from my childhood.

I reach up and grab my collection of Roald Dahl books, remembering how infatuated I was with the Big Friendly Giant, how adorable I found sweet Matilda, how scary the Witches seemed. I begin to think about all the questionnaires we had to fill out in lower school, and how certain life was then. I always knew Roald Dahl was my favorite author, blue was my favorite color, cats were my favorite animal and I wanted to be a teacher. Everything was set. I knew exactly who I was. It’s funny to think I was more self aware at age 8 than I am now, 12 years later.

I come across Alexander’s Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and think about how true it is. Some days really are like that, even in Australia. There is no place on earth free from bad days, no utopia where everything goes perfectly right, and it would be boring if there were. The Giving Tree brings tears to my eyes as for the first time, I begin to understand the true meaning of selflessness, begin to understand what it means to love someone so much that you’re willing to give up yourself, begin to understand why the tree was happy.

I tried to sort through these books this morning, tried to get rid of them, but I couldn’t. I got as far as even holding some over the cardboard box marked “to sell,” but couldn’t release them from my grasp. Instead, I put them back on the shelf and will later pack them in a box to move to my new home. There, I’ll put them on a new shelf and perhaps forget about them for another ten years, repeating the same mistake, but somehow knowing they’ll still be there when I need them. That’s the thing about old friends, they always seem to be there for you no matter how many mistakes you may make. They’ll always be with you, hiding some place within your heart you had forgotten existed until just now. What treasures, these old friends of mine.