I Have No Past

I Have No Past

By:
Dawn Colclasure

There is a line in a Cyndi Lauper song that goes, “We have no past.” I remember thinking every time I heard that line, “How could someone have no past?” I am beginning to understand how, as my past has recently been torn away from me....

I lived in the California desert for 14 years. That part of my life saw me moving from city to city in that desert, even after I left home at 19. During all that moving, I lugged along all of my possessions, loading things into trucks and cars despite my bad back. Of course I had help from family members and there was always someone making the comment, “You have a lot of stuff.” True, but it was my stuff, all a part of my lifetime. Never mind the bags of clothes that had to be loaded up each time, which included a Girl Scout uniform with a sash containing badges; these were all things that belonged to me and my past. Some may say that they were just “things” but they were more than that; they were memories.

The time I lived in one particular city in that desert was the longest I’d lived in any one of them. When I felt that familiar itch to move once again (blame my Gypsy ancestors!), I knew I didn’t want to move to another city, I wanted to move out of the desert. And even as I tried to secure a new home in Los Angeles, some part of me wanted to leave California altogether. The last time I lived out of California, the state of my birth and containing so much of my past, was in the early 1990’s, when I lived in Connecticut. Now a new state would soon be my new home: Oregon. This opportunity came to me through my husband of 2 years getting a good-paying job there. However this decision to move didn’t come easy; my marriage was on the rocks and I seriously considered staying behind. In fact, I’d tried to divorce my husband twice but that never happened. He spent two weeks pleading to me to move to Oregon with him and I started to favor doing so mainly because I didn’t want to separate him and our 3-year-old daughter. Finally, after much soul-searching and talks with my mother, I gave in and said, “I’ll go with you to Oregon.”

And even now after what has happened, I don’t regret this decision. As painful as what happened next would be, I don’t regret moving.

My residence in that particular desert city may have been long but the latter part of it wasn’t very pleasant. I lived on shared property, a duplex of sorts with two units, one in front and the other in back. I lived in the back unit and soon learned just what my parents meant when they said the tenants in the front unit had seniority. At the time we moved in to this unit, we were told we had to share the garage. That was fine; our neighbor in the front didn’t hog up all the room. After he moved, the same went with our new neighbors until we were informed we’d have to store all of our things – furniture, building supplies, power tools and my possessions – into the two storage closets in the garage. Our new neighbors would use the rest of it. And even though this compromised things a little, this arrangement worked out okay. After some of my family members came to pick up what we couldn’t fit in there, this worked out okay. Whatever I couldn’t fit in there, I kept in the closets in my home. Then our neighbors moved and later we had new neighbors: A childless couple named Dane and Diane Smith. They seemed friendly enough and we got along amicably.

Soon, however, that was to change.

The first sign that my neighbors weren’t as amenable as I thought they were is when we were told we had to clear out one of the storage rooms in the garage for them. Apparently, the spacious room they already had for their car, washer, dryer and bicycles were not enough for whatever they had in there. And, like it or not, we’d have to make more room for them. They already had full privilege of the driveway (we had to park our vehicles in a sand lot they took their dog out to poop on) and had the backyard (our front yard) all to themselves whenever they took their dog outside (I was too afraid to let my daughter go out to play when they had their dog out there). And even though Diane and I exchanged pleasantries on the times I’d see her when I went out to get the mail or the Halloween Dane came outside with a bowl of candy when I was taking my daughter out for trick-or-treating, we really didn’t socialize very much. Neither of us did with two past neighbors and the time my parents lived in the front unit was the only time.

Soon before the move, I noticed things start to change with my neighbors. On one occasion, for example, my daughter had played outside and, during the bustle of getting her and all of her things back into the house, I had to put off going back out to set a patio chair back upright. After I calmed her down and unloaded her toys onto the floor, I turned to see Diane standing next to the now upright chair, standing akimbo as she frowned at my window. I wanted to go back out there to tell her I’d been on my way to fix the chair myself but decided not to. She seemed too upset to take it very well. Then there was the occasion my brother came to visit with three of his four kids. The children played outside with my daughter as we sat and talked. I told my brother about an overhanging branch on the tree, which pretty much blocked the top of the slide on the swing set, and he cut the lower part away. Later, as we all sat inside eating pizza and talking, I looked out the window to see Dane angrily stomping away from the tree, huffing into his cell phone. I didn’t have to be psychic to know he was complaining to my landlady.

When moving day was almost here, we got a truck and parked it in the sand lot. At this point, I had a chance to try to resolve any differences between me and my neighbors but they didn’t seem very willing to act neighborly towards us anymore. They started to ignore our greetings and refuse to answer the door anytime we knocked. About a few days after we got the truck, my landlady showed up and wanted to know what was going on. (Up until then, I had stressed the importance of letting her know we were moving but my husband insisted we didn’t need to tell her.) As we talked, she explained that Dane and Diane had called her to let her know about the truck and also to complain about the large pile of trash building up where all the trash went (we got rid of a lot of junk). I explained to my landlady we had every intention of clearing that trash out, yet I was angry at my neighbors for taking this up with her instead of with us. We were, after all, responsible for what we did with our trash, and apparently they thought we were bums leaving that kind of work for them to take care of. This cowardice would soon be what I would label them.

As I talked with my landlady, a still small voice reminded me to let her know I was having trouble getting into the garage. We never had a garage door opener (our delightful neighbors had two) so we had no way of getting into there to retrieve our possessions. All my knocks on the Smith’s door had gone ignored. Unfortunately, I never heeded that voice to tell my landlady about our problem, as she was so upset over not being notified we were moving.

Up until this episode, I’d told my husband about how I’d been unable to retrieve my things from the garage. He often said “it’s just books” but I would reply “I need to see what is in there” since I knew it was more than just ten boxes of books. In fact, I would later recall that it was a whole lot more.

On the day of our departure, my brother showed up to take whatever we couldn’t load into the truck. He loaded up my dad’s truck with a rocking chair, my telescope, canned goods, a bunch of magazines I’d never read, a small bookcase, a lamp, my daughter’s bedroom table and a bunch of other things we’d later replace in our new home. I told my brother about my difficulty in retrieving my things from the garage and he suggested that I contact the sheriff about it, since our neighbors were, technically, illegally hoarding our possessions. I didn’t want to stir up any trouble so I decided not to take my brother’s advice. To this day, that’s something I regret.

My brother assured me he’d show up the next day to retrieve my things but, just as they had with us, my neighbors ignored him when he knocked at their door. In fact, they never even called him when he left a note about why he was there.
Later on, after finally getting a new place to live in Oregon after spending 11 days in a motel, my husband drove me to a local Kinko’s so that I could use the Internet relay service to call home. After finding out from my mother what had happened, I called my landlady. To my overwhelming relief, she told me that all my stuff was still in that garage, but she’d hired a contractor to retrieve anything left behind and haul it off to the dump. We had to leave some other things behind that we couldn’t fit into the truck: A computer desk, microwave cart, shelves I’d used to hold my doll collection on and an antique coffee table. The contractor would also be allowed to break the lock on that storage door in the garage to haul off all of my things, but my former landlady said she’d be more than willing to allow my brother to get in there to get them out. “I’d hate to deprive you of your possessions,” she’d said, after I told her some of the things that I had in there (a couple of books I wrote and some things that belonged to my daughter). She instructed me to call my brother to tell him to contact her about making arrangements to pick it all up. What I didn’t know was that even though she told me he could get all of them the next day, this was a sort of “deadline” to retrieve them. So I called my mother’s house, where my brother lived, and left a message about it. I left Kinko’s thinking it would all be taken care of now and that I could rest easy.

Little did I know how wrong I was....

Several days passed. Even though I had a large bulk of my current writing projects available to work on and a bunch of articles planned, I couldn’t write. When I slept, I had bad dreams of my former landlady laughing at me because she’d destroyed all my things or how I’d scream at my former neighbors for giving me the grief they did. I was further disturbed over how my mother had told me my father had gone to the sheriff about this but the sheriff said that since I wasn’t there anymore, there was nothing they could do. This only tugged at me; had I made a mistake in coming with my husband to a state where I didn’t know a soul, that had nothing to offer me and to live with someone I was barely getting along with? Had I made a bad choice?

It was a while before I could contact my family again. My husband’s job kept him so busy and, being deaf, it wasn’t like I could use a cell phone to call the phone company with. I had no car to drive to Kinko’s to call my family and, besides, we were struggling with money since the move, the motel and the new residence plus food and gas had us under a huge financial crunch. My only link to my family came in the form of a Blackberry mobile device, which I used to e-mail one of my sisters with. When I finally heard back from her on whether or not my brother got everything for me, her response was positive. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, mumbled thanks to God and went back to work, writing the hopefully final draft of a novel. Then my tension flared up again when I got the following e-mail from my sister: “That lady never called us back about getting your stuff from the garage.”

Now I was confused; just exactly what had happened?

When I finally had a chance to call my mother again, I found out: They’d called my former landlady several times but never had their messages returned. My brother’s knocks on my former neighbor’s door were never answered and once again the sheriff told my father he couldn’t do anything. After I finished talking with my mother, I called my former landlady. I left a message on how my brother was trying to pick up my things and a phone number to reach him at. It was about two days later that I was able to make phone calls again and my mother informed me that my former landlady had never called her.

“Have you been checking your messages?” I asked, remembering the many times I’d called her in the past only to have the messages I’d left for her disappear.

“Oh, yeah,” my mother replied. “I’ve been home every day, listening to those messages.”

So I called my former landlady. After identifying myself, she said, “If you’re calling about all of your stuff, it’s gone.” My heart sank and I felt a lump in my throat. As I typed my request to find out what had happened, tears formed in my eyes. There were people seated at the other work stations next to me so I didn’t want to make a scene, but tears still rolled down my checks as she told me she’d called my brother the day after we’d first spoken but he never returned her call. That same day, the contractor showed up at my former shared residence and hauled everything off. She was already paying him $500 for the job so she didn’t want him to make two trips.

I saw this as my last chance to tell my former landlady exactly what I should’ve told her long ago: That it was unfair we never had access to that garage, that it was wrong of our neighbors to try to take over the whole thing and that they never answered the door when I’d tried to get my things out of there. She said she couldn’t speak for them, but during the time I knew I was moving, I had access to them to request they open the garage for me. I was ready to scream, “No, I didn’t!”
I soon ended the call because I was so upset. After I finished, I mumbled something to my husband about what had happened then left the store. I stood outside the door, knelt against the wall and burst into tears. As sobs came out of my mouth, memories of just exactly what had been in that storage room flooded my mind: Things left to me from my grandmother, my college attendance records (thank God I had my high school diploma with me!), all the songs I’d written as a teen, scattered diaries and journals, old family photos and keepsakes. I’d planned to leave some things to my daughter but now they were gone: Some books I wrote, my diaries, a lot of other writings, my school yearbooks and copies of newspapers I’d been published in. These were all a part of my past: Who I was before I had her. The dreams I had, things I’d accomplished and little facets of the person I used to be. There were journals I’d written of the many family road trips, genealogical records and photos, a book I’d written about a paranormal experience I had which lasted for several years (this was the only copy), all of my letters from family and friends, my sport card collection and a T.V. Guide my picture was in that time I appeared on the local news. All of my notes and drafts for a couple of old novels were in there, too, as well as black and white photos of Jackie and John F. Kennedy a local store owner had given to me (they were the original photographs taken by the photographer), floor plans I’d drawn in my late teens (during the time I wanted to pursue a career building houses) and a hobby set involving a little radio I’d put together. Gone. They were all gone.

I shook my head as I continued to cry, aware of my husband standing behind me with his hand on my back. I knew he was trying to comfort me but, all the same, I was angry at him. He’d told me before if he had known it was more than “just books” in that garage, he would’ve gone to the sheriff about it himself but my insistence of needing to see exactly what was in there hadn’t been enough. I was angry at him for spending two weeks pressuring me to come out here with him when I didn’t even love him anymore, angry that he had managed to do with his possessions whatever he wanted to since he didn’t have anything in that garage, but most of all, I was angry at him for once again thinking of his own self without caring about what I wanted. This is the thing that hung over my head: He’d taken care of his things but he didn’t really care about what happened to mine. He was so hurried to move out here. I wondered if he even realized how important some of that stuff had been to me.

I shot to my feet to face him. “I never should’ve come here!” I sobbed, fighting back another stream of tears. “I never should’ve come with you. I should’ve stayed and taken care of it myself!”

It took everything I had to get myself to stop crying. After all, my 3-year-old was standing right there, obviously concerned. So I swallowed more tears, wiped my eyes and said, “Let’s go home.” But on the way home, the weight of it all came down on me. It seemed like one curve ball after another was being thrown at me: My marriage was crumbling (and the reason for my marital problems, emotional abuse, tugged at me), I wasn’t getting anywhere with a writing business I’d been trying for several months to get started up, my novel was at a dead end, another novel had been rejected, I was broke, I had no friends where I lived, no family close by, no phone, Internet, cable or car. I’d managed to sell a couple of articles I had out there and I was able to work on some book reviews as well as do research for my next nonfiction book, but the scale dish containing all of the negatives I had to deal with outweighed those positives. It seemed like one thing after another was going wrong and now I had this burden to carry: A large part of my past, a past I wanted to save so my daughter could one day know what kind of person I was growing up, was gone. A lot of those things can’t be replaced, and even though I had memories, they weren’t enough to give to my child someday. The tears came rushing back and I sobbed, probably to no one except God, “Can’t I get one break?!”

After we got home, I went upstairs and climbed into bed. I lied there in the darkness, struggling with my emotions and thoughts. Long ago, I think when we were living in Illinois, there’d been a fire in my parent’s bedroom closet. My mother had lost some priceless things, among them a fur coat my dad bought for her and some family jewelry. I could still remember how distraught my mother had been over losing these things that meant so much to her, but I couldn’t remember if there were things she’d lost that, like myself right now, couldn’t be replaced. I could live with losing all of those boxes of books as well as a bag of my daughter’s toys. I could live with losing Christmas decorations and even the little radio I’d put together. But what of the things I could never get back again? All those notes my friends in high school had written in my yearbooks? All those letters from my late grandmother and cousins that lived so far away? And all those diaries where I’d written about the time there was a fire at a house I’d lived in, how a nephew had almost drowned in my parents’ swimming pool, how a tree had caught on fire one Fourth of July at my brother’s, how my aunt had passed away and what pain it caused my mother, and all the problems my mom had gone through because of her poor health? On one side, one might think that it’s better that I no longer have these reminders, but they are, after all, a part of my past. All of those things contributed to the person I am today.

As I continued to lie there in the darkness, sniffling more tears, I remembered two sayings I have. “Disasters are God’s way of helping you get rid of clutter” is a more recent one I’ve developed, but even as it wasn’t a disaster that has taken these things from me, I started to see it that way. Just as my mom had lost things in that fire, I had to see all those things destroyed in a “fire.” That was the way I had to look at it now, they were destroyed in a fire. Of course I couldn’t really make such a claim and now everybody knows what really happened to them, but I just have to tell myself that this is what happened to them. Another saying is, “Everything happens for a reason.” This is a saying that, despite the bad things I’ve been through, I still believe with all my heart. Maybe someday I will understand what kind of reason it is that justifies losing all of those things, but I just couldn’t see it right now. I saw no reason in any of this right now. Maybe the reason was to show me that my child doesn’t need “things” to know what kind of person I was or that memories should suffice instead of letters or things passed on. Maybe it’s to serve as a reminder that I should really start to listen to that still small voice I so often ignore, that I should stand up for what I want or for what belongs to me, or maybe that I should never live on shared property again. I don’t know. All I kept thinking was that this was a painful price to pay for coming with someone who that very day I wanted to tell I wanted to live apart from.

Later, as my husband and I talked, I told him that I did still have some things of our daughter’s: Her baby book, a lot of baby pictures I always kept with me and the first outfit she’d worn on the day I brought her home from the hospital. He said the baby book was all I really needed.

I also realized something else: I did still have some things from my past. There was the autographed novel a friend had gotten signed for me when I was in the hospital and couldn’t get it signed myself, a few of my baby pictures, my wedding dress, old photo albums, my class ring, magazines I’d been published in and my doll collection. Not everything from my past was gone but, as I thought more about this, I had to build new memories and get some new things to pass on to her. Maybe one of these days she’ll take an interest in cooking and be grateful to have my recipe collection to indulge in, maybe she’ll be grateful for my movie collection, perhaps she’ll find some value in the artwork one of my sisters did for my poetry books. And I still had those magazines I’d published during the time I had a poetry club. Yes, I still do have some things to leave to her and even if they are not things of the person I once was growing up, they are still parts of me nevertheless.

Still, I can’t shake off the feeling that there’s so much of my past my little girl will never know about. What will she read and hear of the car accident I was in when I was 20 months old, which left me with third degree burns and which I almost died in if it hadn’t been for two firefighters who pulled me out from underneath a van? What will she know of the time I had spinal meningitis when I was 14, which left me profoundly deaf? Who will tell her the stories of the pranks I and my siblings played on each other, how I got kicked out of a musical performance because I wouldn’t sing, the “mystery club” my sister and cousins developed when we lived in St. Louis, the things we saw and heard when we lived in a haunted house and when another house had ghosts appearing here and there? What about the time I saw Michael Jackson at a doctor’s office, Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson at a New York hospital, celebrity buses during the many trips we took and how I’d told off George Lucas’ secretary after being refused, yet again, a telephone conversation with him? What about the dreams I had in which I saw and talked with angels, saw an image in the sky representing God telling me things, and of the dreams I had in which I’d hear voices from the sky and a burning bush? Who will tell her stories of how I always fell during my cross country runs in high school? There was even a joke in circulation about that and I had a picture of myself, in uniform, with a giant scab on my left knee. That picture is one of the things I’ve lost but I do have a T-shirt from a race I participated in. What will she know of how my sister and I wanted to start a band, using all of those songs (and even videos) that I wrote?

But, most of all, what will she know of me?

Several years ago, one of my aunts suggested I write my life story. At the time, I shrugged off the idea, thinking that, first of all, it wasn’t really a life worthy of putting into a whole book. Second, my memory isn’t all that great and so it’d be darn near impossible to remember all of the important things that should go into an autobiography. Besides, celebrities, war victims, disaster survivors and former presidents wrote autos; what did it matter if I wrote one or not?
Besides, I had things from my past to act as some kind of reminder that, once upon a time, I existed.

But now after this, after almost all of those things are gone forever, I have nothing left to show that I did this, I got through that, I wanted to grow up to be this or how I saw that. I have nothing left. All those posters from the time I wanted to join the Air Force: Gone. All those ceramic and wood shop projects from high school: Gone. All those pictures from my childhood which I drew that my mother had saved: Gone.

The fact that I had a childhood: Gone.

So now the idea of writing an autobiography isn’t one I dismiss so quickly. I know I have a crummy memory but maybe now that I have nothing left of my past to remember things with, now that my memories are all that is left, maybe I will be able to remember most of the things from my past. The things I want my daughter to know about, anyway. If no one publishes it, the technology of self-publishing and POD give me that chance to make it a permanent part of this world. A part that no one will ever be able to destroy, a part my child can carry with her after I’m gone and a part that can even be shared.

Maybe writing the autobiography is the reason for that episode happening. Maybe, in some way, my daughter needed something all in one little book to receive as my legacy to her, and not in a bunch of boxes. And at least, this way, no one will ever be able to store all of the books somewhere I won’t be able to have any access to them. ¨