Keeping tabs Why I treasure trash BY CHRIS WRIGHT

I am a loser. By which I mean, I lose things. Keys, money, cigarettes, sunglasses, airplane tickets. Once I lost an entire croquet set. Another time I misplaced a moving truck. The strange thing is, while I’m very good at losing things of value, I tend to hoard rubbish. I cannot put a hand in my pocket without pricking my finger on some long-forgotten toothpick. I have boxes bursting with meaningless scraps of paper. Except they’re not meaningless. Not to me.

The other day, I put on a jacket I haven’t worn in years and found, stuffed in the pocket, a crumpled ATM slip. I know that most normal people would have dumped it in the trash, but not me. Instead, I sat down, flattened the ATM slip out with the palm of my hand, and began to read. As I sat there, years of heartache and happiness came flooding back to me. It was like Proust’s madeleine, only inedible.

The slip dated back to 1995. I had taken $60 from a BayBank at the corner of Mass Ave and Boylston. It was 7:57 p.m., December 12 — three months after I’d met my wife-to-be. Maybe we were going out to eat, maybe not. What’s indisputable, though, is that I’d withdrawn $60 and I was in love. There’s clarity in this. There’s also comfort. Even though it’s a FleetBank now, I still go to that ATM. I am no longer married, but I still go out every now and then. Things were different then, but not so very different. I folded the ATM slip in half and put it back where I found it.

I have a billion artifacts like this. I am a Smithsonian of threadbare movie stubs, a British Museum of bygone to-do lists. I own a suitcase that contains, among other items, a plastic spoon that has to be 15 years old. Every now and then, I’ll go through the stuff in that case — the doodles I drew, the notes I wrote: "Jay called. Have you seen my scarf?" When I come to the spoon, I’ll take it out and sniff it. I have no idea where I got it, or why I kept it, but there it is, next to the business card of someone I can’t remember meeting, a tape of music I can’t remember liking. All the same, I’ll put the tape on — It’s a marvelous night for a moon dance — and try to recall what happened to that scarf. It was plaid and scratchy. For some reason, these details are important.

"What were we doing this time last week?" Anyone who has spent any time with me will be familiar with this question. I don’t care what the answer is — a "watching TV" will do — I just like to know. This is a natural impulse, I think — like when you’re swimming, always glancing back to the shore. You want to know where you are in relation to where you were. It’s how we keep from getting stranded. My trash represents the same impulse. It’s a paper trail back to my past.

In many ways, worthless scraps reveal more than the snapshots and letters we keep. In holding onto meaningful things, we arrange our lives into a series of familiar episodes: the week we spent in Paris, the moment we realized a relationship was over. Memory tends to work in much the same way — we narrow our lives down to a few representative moments and leave it at that. When we confront unfamiliar or inconsequential details from the past, though, we are forced to take stock of where we were at the time, what we were doing, what we felt.

Not so long ago, I came across a box of mine in the corner of a shed out in Western Massachusetts. I almost yelped when I saw it. This was a mother lode, a Tomb of the Pharaohs of personal junk. I found poems I’d written as a teen (so much anger I felt then, so much rhyming anger), and a bunch of old photographs. In one, I’m wearing a red bandana around my neck and a big smile on my face. Looking at this picture made me feel uneasy. I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that I had nothing in common with this person. That this wasn’t me.

Finally, at the bottom of the box, I came across a sheaf of letters from my first love, Sari, who moved to Finland almost 20 years ago. Mostly, they are filled with chitchat — she got a rabbit and named it Williams, the weather was awful. In the last letter, Sari wrote that she didn’t want to see me again. This information, presumably, was the inspiration for the poem that began, "Something’s amiss, she cries from the pages,/and love is dissected and thrown in our faces." I looked again at the boy with the happy face and decided that I had to do something. I had to talk to Sari. Eventually, I found her number.

"Hello? It’s Chris. Chris Wright." There was a pause. "Remember me?"

"Of course I do," a voice replied. "I still have some of your stuff."

A few months later, I met up with Sari in London, where she lives with her husband and two children. We went for coffee at an outdoor café. The last time I’d seen Sari, we’d both been crying, promising we’d see each other again. And here she was. We chatted for an hour or so, pecked each other on the cheek, and went our separate ways. I don’t know what I’d expected to feel upon seeing Sari again, but this wasn’t it. I walked back to the station with a sense that I’d failed at something.

At first, I thought my disappointment stemmed from the fact that there were no fireworks. I didn’t expect us to fall sobbing into each other’s arms, but I thought there might be something, some kind of emotional recall. There wasn’t. We were strangers, and with every story we told we became more distant. By seeing Sari, I’d hoped to make a connection with my past, and I’d achieved the opposite. I’d become alienated from myself.

After the Sari episode, I considered throwing my old stuff away. You can spend so much time looking back that you don’t get anywhere. But then I took the train ticket from my journey to that outdoor café and put it in a box. One day I’ll take it out and look at it. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get Sari to dig up that stuff of mine she says she has. There’s probably an unsent postcard or two from when I visited her in Helsinki. Maybe a receipt for the pair of gloves I bought there. They were brown suede, wool-lined. I have no idea what happened to them. But that was a cold, cold winter.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com