Trove of Clues

Tim and I spent time over the Valentine’s Day weekend reading through my collection of notes he had written me in high school. They’ve been in a box since the day I received them, still in their original form, folded into trapezoids or squares, tight little bundles of words he wrote to pass to me between classes. These are our historical documents, the written record filling in the gaps of what neither of us could quite remember.

Knowing it contained notes I had received from Tim while we were dating in high school, we decided to go through it together. Did Tim *want* to do this? No. But he agreed to, and he DID, and that’s what counts. And it turns out, he’s pretty glad he did.

It’s been revelatory to see our relationship on paper like this. Tim’s personality speaks clearly from 1985, defiantly intelligent, a little arrogant, and anti-authoritarian. As he is now. We had both remembered our time together inaccurately, and we had both remembered each other and our connection perfectly. We each had huge events later in our young adulthood that obscured our memories, so we pored over this trove of clues to halcyon days of our adolescence for a couple of very engaging nights of discussion.

Tim’s life in that period was very busy. I had remembered that he was in hockey and jazz band and orchestra, but I’d forgotten his involvement in pit orchestra and *another* band outside of school—on top of having a part-time job. Before we found these notes, he remembered that time as the “busiest and happiest” time of his life, but the notes show otherwise. Between all of these commitments and maintaining his A-average in school, he was exhausted. All the time. All he wanted to do, he wrote frequently, was curl up and take a nap. He couldn’t wait to get out of some of his commitments, primarily playing on the hockey team.

The biggest shock for me was how intensely musical he was. I have never thought of him as a “musician”, only someone who plays the guitar. My first husband was a professional musician, so that experience defined my understanding of what makes a person a musician. Hell, I didn’t even think of myself as a musician by comparison, but it’s clear I was using a flawed metric. Tim loved playing the guitar—and, when the band required, the tuba. He took lessons and sought opportunities to learn new music and improve his skill regularly. He wanted to quit other activities and do more music. I didn’t remember that at all.

I had also forgotten just how considerate and thoughtful he was, and the most respectful boyfriend any girl could ask for. I was *really* lucky. In every note, 16-year-old Tim said something sweet or funny or loving about me—details of which I will keep close to my heart, thank you very much—and ended almost every one with a promise of his undying love. He was as regular about this as he was about complaining about his Algebra 3 teacher, who apparently had a conical head.

We had kept that box of notes in storage from the day I moved the last of my stuff out of my dad’s house, sometime in 1999. For more than 25 years, that box has kicked around with us, even traveling across the country. Tim was not eager to look at them, this being his own version of a Pandora’s Box out of which untold terrors might escape. Because he hadn’t remembered that time, he feared the worst, expecting himself to have been something other than the gentle, sweet, funny boy I remembered. Or thought I remembered.

He was my friend most of all, and I was his. We shared struggles with each other, leaned on each other. Our mothers gave each of us lots of trouble, though in very different ways. Mine grounded me multiple times for sins related to going out with Tim. Wink and nod all you like, but I know the truth. His controlled him with money, always money, demanding he repay them immediately for school trips and other expenses that I would consider part of raising kids. The notes showed he battled with her regularly, which he had forgotten completely. He thought their problems started later.

What’s shocking about both of these parental conflicts is that we were both really good kids; good students, athletes, musicians, people who took our commitments seriously, never EVER got into trouble in school, didn’t drink or do drugs, didn’t rebel against our parents. We didn’t even rebel against society. We just wanted to hang out on Friday and Saturday nights with our friends, make out in the back of a van, play some music and be teenagers.

Reading these notes returned Tim to me. The timbre of our early relationship is clear now in ways it hadn’t been for years. It was sweeter than I remembered, more gentle and kind. That time in our lives now has another dimension, no longer flattened by poor recollection. He was my first boyfriend, my first true love, and now I see that my judgment was very good at 15, as it was when I was 30 when he came back into my life.

A block has been unexpectedly removed. Fear of examining the past kept us from remembering some valuable and affirming sweetness not just between us, but within our individual selves. I see him differently now, not just as this man next to whom I am growing and aging and developing into the future, but as the funny, sandpapery, ginger-ale-and-pine-scented boy I loved so deeply. He is both at once, in the same way I can see my kids as all the ages they ever were all at the same time.

This box of notes has made me very glad Tim sat next to me in French class in the first hour of the first day of freshman year of high school, and glad that he found me out of the blue 15 years later and sent me a letter, and glad that he will still sit across from me at our kitchen table, carefully unfolding notes he wrote to me all those years ago, and taking a peek inside who we used to be. I’m a lucky girl.