My treasures

I mentioned in a recent post that I've been on a sorting and tossing binge this month.

In the large closet behind the upstairs bathroom are a few of my childhood treasures. I came across them as I was de-cluttering, but they have not been thrown out or donated to Goodwill. No, siree! These are my very special treasures which have followed along with me whenever I've made a move.

First, my scrapbook of the Royal Family. I was definitely hung up on the Royal Family of Great Britain when I was in my early teens. I saved every magazine and newspaper clipping about them. I bet you didn't know, for instance, that Prince Charles had an appendectomy at age 14. My scrapbook contains a clipping announcing that momentous incident. (I should admit I had a slight advantage over most other Royal Family-obsessed Maine teenagers, if, in fact, they existed: my New Brunswick relatives subscribed to a magazine or two that never failed to mention their Queen and her family; a yearly trip to NB gave me the opportunity to scour Grammy's or Aunt Jean's back issues and clip articles for my scrapbook. I'd come home with priceless loot every time.)

You can probably imagine my shock and delight the day I went to our mailbox and found a letter from Buckingham Palace. I'd felt the need to send the Queen a congratulatory note after the birth of Prince Andrew. I certainly didn't expect to get a response, but a lady-in-waiting sent

this note to me. This was such a big occasion in central Maine that an article about my "letter from the Queen," or practically the Queen, appeared in our daily newspaper. My fifteen minutes of fame, as it were.

My obsession with the Royal Family cooled a bit when President Kennedy took office here in the U.S. I say that because the second half of my Royal Family scrapbook is actually filled with clippings of the Kennedys' every move.

Apparently I sent the President a congratulatory note when he became president, because I have a response here to prove it.

And, sadly, when President Kennedy was assassinated, which happened during my senior year of high school, I must have sent a sympathy note to Mrs. Kennedy, for the black-edged acknowledgment below was a sent by a member of her staff.

Also in my little stack of childhood treasures is my report on the State of Maine. According to the date handwritten inside, I wrote this report while taking Maine History from Mr. Gilbert in eighth grade. I suspect every single word of the report, detailing Maine's population, Maine's natural resources, Maine's this and that, I meticulously copied verbatim from the "M" volume of the World Book Encyclopedia. Yes, plagiarism was alive and well back then, too.

It isn't my plagiarized report that has caused me to treasure this school project, however; it's the report's cover. My oldest brother, Win, must've spent a great deal of time with plywood and jigsaw, carefully cutting a front and back cover in the shape of the State of Maine. Had we been living in, say, Wyoming or Colorado, which are run-of-the-mill rectangular states, my report cover wouldn't be half as impressive. But we were living in Maine, for crying out loud, with its wonderfully irregular coastline. I'm sure my report deserved an "A" for the cover alone, never mind the plagiarism inside.