Dead Stuff

In order to break through 'writer's block,' one guidebook suggests to open a drawer and write about the contents inside.

I haven't had the block for a while now, but I did open my lil' desk drawer today to withdraw a pen. My desk only has one, slim drawer, in which I've packed in a standard, black desk tray complete with three small divots that hold paperclips, clickster pencil refills, and other sundries, and a longer, scallop that's filled with writing implements. I have another, undivided white plastic tray that's filled to the one-inch brim (the drawer's height is only 2 inches so I need to be a good packer) with important items including white-out (important while working on a computer), an unpeeled Bandelier National Monument sticker with Kokopelli figurines, a tiny, jawbreaker-sized orange iMac computer screen with "hello (again)"

Back to the sectionalized tray. Funny, it's really a black, plasticine version of our old school lunch trays, minus the rails on the bottem used to slide along the lunchroom's stainless steel bars when selecting a square of overcooked spinach mush or salisbury steak & an icecream scoop of mashed po's. Intelligent design, I suppose, using all those long lost trays as tool and trinket holders in our desks. Portion sizes prob became too small for the American appetite, just the same.

Inside my drawer, beyond the moat of unused wallet, memory sticks, and broken-armed reading glasses, the left, corner tray cup draws my attention. Life forms, or items that once were life forms lay upon each other like ancient carcasses. A sickle-shaped tooth, capped on the root end with silver intended for a key ring or necklace with a silver tip covering the point. It's smooth, like a polished stone yet without the polish. Years of pocket time or endless nights spent beneath a handkerchief in my mom's jewelry drawer wore it to a sheen.
Beneath it rests a tubular antler piece, calamari-sized, sans the breaded edges. It, too is smooth, but the grooves of time and age are darkened, like rings on a tree. Two opposite holes bored through it, ideal for a string tie or a very eager worm working in one direction. It peaks on one side, such that when it's resting on my desk like a standard ring, and I look down at it, the pointy edge becomes a nose a beneath it, the gaping hole a mouth. Behind the mouth, of course, is that cavernous ring, then on the backside, the opposing hole or mirrored mouth: the backdoor for that hungry worm.
To its immediate left is a postage stamp sized square of what I'm assuming is tusk. It's wafer thin and yellowed from at least 75 years of ownership in Mom's jewelry drawer. She showed it to me once when I was a curious little first-grader digging through her strings of artsy necklaces and clangy bracelets. "Alaska" sweeps across the top of a single-line mountain ridge in 10-pt cursive engraved font. Beneath is an etched caricature of a hooded musher - his back to my eye - leading a packed sled with distinct rail lines which slices across the curved, ivoried snow. A perfect hole, just wide enough for a b-b sized brass ball keyring punctures through the upper left corner above musher's head. It's smooth on its underbelly in the small concave arch. The etching, though, is rough like an Alaskan winter. The chiseling is deep and time-defying.

Mom told me once that her Uncle Charles gave this to her when he traveled up to Alaska. She loved her Uncle Charles and he doted upon her even from across the country.

Sand-blasted snail and clam shells and a miniscule, urn-shaped seed small enough to fit through a buttonhole round out my drawer of non-living items. The seed's gradation in color from desert tan at its round base to its rich mahogany tip shows how time and change affects even the tiniest of life forces such as a seed.

There's a certain comforting strangeness to all these dead things, these bony relics that fill my little square cup in the corner of my desk drawer. This is especially odd when I contrast those once-livings with the tiny broken string of baby blue beads, some the size of tapioca and others a slightly larger, say, blanched papaya seeds. An embossed 'W' on a pearly papaya bead separated by single blue tapioca, then ten more pasty whites spells out my last name and reaches out to the tail of five baby blues again. This was my father's i.d. bracelet when he lay in the maternity ward just after his birth. His name, his life denoted by this tiny 10-inch bracelet which wrapped around his pudgy infant wrist two times showed passersby and the nursing staff who he was, who he'd become.
Now, it's a simple sign of life that snakes around these little momentos of once-life in my drawer and reminds me of how the past steps into the present and back again.