1.1 Whose Memento Is It?

Funkybutt clip courtesy of Juli Berg and Candace Corelli.

Music by Blue Dot Sessions and UltraCat, via a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License. Songs used: "A Palace of Cedar" and "Scalloped" (Blue Dot Sessions) and Disco High (UltraCat)

"This is Roller Skating" by The Roller Skating Foundation of America (public domain, Mark 1)

Roller skating rink ambient sounds from SoundSnap (www.soundsnap.com). 

TRANSCRIPT

Is there this one thing that you can't throw away or wish you hadn't thrown because it had some kind of meaning for you that was connected to another person or an experience?

Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about here on Mementos – so thank you for joining me, Lori Mortimer, your host, on this first episode.

We’re going to explore the personal meaning and deeper stories behind the items people keep. What makes an ordinary item a memento?

Not collectibles, but individual items that are really containers of meaning. Items that hold memories, they hold stories, emotions, and sometimes raise questions that will never, ever be answered.

The idea for this podcast sprouted after my mother died and I had to empty her house.

About three days before Habitat for Humanity was coming to take what was left, I came across one particular item that threw me for a loop.

What I found was something that had belonged to my mom when she was an adolescent and which I didn't know she owned. At that point, I’d already cleaned out every closet, every cabinet, every kitchen drawer. I had looked in every pocket of every coat and every pair of pants and every skirt. I had literally touched every item inside the house and had had decided its fate.

So I started working in the garage.

And I was digging in this back corner underneath the stairs to the garage attic. So I had I pulled out the shop vac, and I found my brother’s old chain saw in there. And Behind that, I found my dad's old manual typewriter, and that was a pretty cool thing to find.

And then I saw this wooden box. It wasn’t very big, maybe a foot by a foot square, maybe about 8 inches tall.

I crouched down to move further under the stair with that sloping ceiling.

So I reached and I grabbed it by its handle, and I slid it toward me across the floor. It was just covered in dust, and near the handle, it had a brass latch on the front.

I honestly had no idea what was in it. I had never seen this box before.

It was clearly old, because nothing comes in a wooden box like that anymore.

So I brushed away the dust and I opened it up.

And inside was a pair of white leather roller skates.

And they had wooden wheels and wooden stoppers on the front.

And I just didn’t know my mother owned these.

At this point, I had found a lot of personal things. I mean, but this … there was sobbing.

There was wailing. There was snot. I mean, I just lost it.

But why? I mean, it’s roller skates.

I think it was a lot of things, right? I think it was, you know, she had only just died a couple of months earlier. And there was then all the pressure to go through everything, to sell the house, and to get rid of so much personal stuff.

But I really think that what I saw when I looked in that box was that the person who died wasn't a 74-year-old woman. It was my grandmother's daughter.

I think that's what hit me. My grandmother’s only child just passed away. And my grandmother most likely gave her those skates.

My grandfather died in 1944, when my mother was 2 and a half. And my grandmother, who had to find a job immediately, started working two weeks later. But she made very little money.

On Fridays, all she had left was a nickel to take the bus to work. And she needed her paycheck, so that at the end of the day, she had bus fair back home.

So these roller skates must have been an extravagance for the only child of a single mother.

She was, of course, a child I never knew. So the roller skates are like this connection to my parent as a child who I could have never known as a child.

When I saw the roller skates, I imagined the teenage version of her. I had also just recently found a picture of her as an adolescent, which I imagined to be of the same vintage as the skates.

It's like she's totally doofy in this picture. It’s like her eyes are closed, and she's got this big goofy smile. And so I picture that girl in those roller skates at the roller rink in the 1950s wearing a poodle skirt with a white blouse with a little scarf around her neck.

Male voice: This is roller skating, America's favorite fun sport, a wholesome year-round recreation. Teenagers rate it tops for exciting fun and for wholesome recreation. Wholesome sport for all ages. Wholesome, outdoor fun, wholesome, wholesome, wholesome.

We are convinced that on the American scene, one of the most potent wa