Keeping Time

Keeping Time
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday October 12, 2013

Memory is a fickle companion. I never know which moments of my life it will choose to preserve. That’s why I like to hang onto things – keepsakes – as an antidote to forgetting.

I still have the doll who followed me everywhere as a child. (She was my favourite because she liked to put me first). I named her Colleen – a good Irish name for a doll made in China. She had turquoise eyes with thick black lashes and strange plastic eyelids that fluttered briefly before closing in forgiveness when I tipped her out of her pram. She also had a blonde cowlick that gave her an unattractive bald spot at the back of her head. But I loved her anyway.

Last week, foraging in the back of a cupboard, I discovered her languishing in a cardboard coffin like Snow White. She was lying on a bed of tissues, wedged into a shoebox – one eye open, one stuck closed – but as lovely as ever. In the bottom of the box was a plastic sleeve containing all the miniature Qantas condiments from my plane trip to Melbourne as a 12 year old (salt, pepper, sugar, mustard and my first ever moist towelette). There was also a collection of faded postcards from an uncle with wanderlust  and the stub of a concert ticket to Duran Duran in 1983. 

Thirty years later, my doll-memory is yet to fail me. I can still remember the embroidered cream flowers on the hem of Colleen’s crimson dress and how her knickers had no elastic. I can recall my 12-year-old urge to pocket the kangaroo-embossed cutlery on that plane. And I can still picture the euphoric teenage me after the Duran Duran foursome emerged from the stage door of the Entertainment Centre and scrawled their initials in my autograph book.

Why cling to such schmaltz? I have kept crates of my relics, rarely opened but dragged from old house to new house, garage to garage. Why do I curate these treasures?

Last month, the pragmatist I live with was cleaning out the carport to make way for eldest son’s new ping-pong table. He pushed half a dozen packing boxes towards me: “It’s time” he said, and we both knew what he meant. Inwardly seething (but outwardly compliant), I sat down on an old milk crate and opened my cartons. I pawed through folders stuffed with school exercise books, runner-up tennis trophies and an assortment of papier mache animals made in Mr Antoine’s Year 5 class using strips of newspaper and Clag glue. (Mr Antoine was expert at craft projects but I lived in fear of his sweaty man-hands brushing against mine.)

For the first time since 1993, I ripped the dusty duct-tape off a box labelled ‘me’. It was stacked with cement-grey Betacam cassettes, an embarrassing archive of my early years of television reportage, when Jana Wendt was my idol. I wore my hair tizzy like hers, with shoulder pads like body armour in my pastel-coloured suits.

Tucked inside a large envelope was a sheath of love letters (mostly mine, unsent). They transported me back to the summer I turned 17, adoring the two lifeguards at my local swimming pool. My girlfriend and I would lie artfully reclined on our towels, basting ourselves with Reef Oil. Those lifeguards never came near us. Perhaps because we weren’t drowning – or because we looked like two rotisserie chickens crisping in the sun.

And so I tipped out the dregs from the last carton and stuffed our recycling bin with wads of Archie comics and school Year-books and diaries doodled with love hearts next to names like Scottie and Gav and Craig.

My detritus gone, I felt a pang of despair. Could I mark the passage of time without these mementos? And if these precious souvenirs meant so much to me, why had I spent so little time poring over them?

The next morning, the rubbish truck pulled up and I watched as its robotic arm snatched our bin and dumped my memories amongst its smelly innards. Now the proof of my past was churned up with everyone else’s.

I drifted back into the house and surveyed my modernist existence – mass-produced beds and televisions, computers and plates and cups. If a chair breaks, I’ll get another one from Ikea. But against the loungeroom wall, I saw with fresh eyes my grandmother’s sideboard.

That rosewood buffet is the one piece of furniture that wasn’t sold off after she died. Instead, it sits in awkward conversation with my sleek new sofa and funky swivelling armchairs. It’s a relic of Nan’s world, clashing with mine. All the same, I couldn’t bear to part with that shellacked showpiece – it’s one of the family, like a faithful old dog, following me across suburbs on its unsteady cabriole legs.

Why am I so sentimental about heirlooms I don’t much like? Perhaps collecting memories is less about the memories and more about the collecting.