It is weird how I got to this topic.
When Calvin has a good day (which is 99.99% of his school days), he gets a print-out of his favorite characters. He had such a stack of them that I asked to holepunch them and put them in binders. He agreed, and a new project was born.
The other day, I was on this chore after the piles in his playroom hit the floor. Yes, I could have had my son do it. This is one of the few things I love doing for him, though. It gives me another sense of who he is and the days he spent in school.
After a while, my heavy duty hole puncher was not working well. For some reason, it would not punch a hole in the left center of the page. So, I put it away for the moment and took out a smaller one. It was hardly holding itself together, the plastic breaking from the metal and it did not like taking more than one page at a time, but it worked all the same.
You might think this is some trivial item and something stupid to talk about. It's a broken holepunch. But the story behind it is long and strange...and reminds me of the passage of time.
Well, this story begins in 2006. My family had moved from Winsted to Terryville. I had to switch schools, of course, but unfortunately, I was going into my last year of high school. I was a new student, only knowing my class for one school year, and graduating and going off to college.
It was a lot, and I did not realize how much until years later. At the time, I was expected to have a job after school and excel in school. My parents were no longer paying for any of my hygiene items, clothes, bedding, school supplies and other small items I wanted anymore at that point, and had been since I was fourteen. My sister had been able to get a job at sixteen/seventeen, and the same was expected of me.
There was also the expectation to excel and go to college. At the time, I did not realize that I was burnt out from education. I wanted to be free, experience the world, and then settle down on a career. I had been on a straight and narrow course that was fraught with anxiety and stress, and I wanted to escape it completely. The opportunity to get a job was the pathway out, as I saw it.
There were people who made my life a living hell at the high school. There were also others who made my only year there bearable. One of those was a teacher named Mr. Nave. Yes, that is his real name, and he taught three of my classes (if I remember right). One of them was Sociology/Psychology, and that was during the lunch period.
There were girls who were kind to me and invited me to their table for lunch. I was incredibly shy. I could not stand the noise and the crowds in there, so I initially stayed in the library. As soon as the librarian's aide discovered that I was not eating lunch, she would not let me stay with her anymore. So, Mr. Nave allowed me to stay in his classroom.
During that 25 minute-ish time, I would reorganize my binders and hole punch them. I ran out of plastic protectors ages ago and I borrowed Mr. Nave's holepunch. He did not mind. I took care of it and always returned it before the bell rang.
One day, Mr. Nave stopped me and gave me the holepunch pictured, except it was not as broken as it is now. It fit into my binder for class. It did not have a catch for the circle papers, but that did not matter. I gathered them up and put them in the trash.
I was touched. Nobody outside of my family's circle had given me something like that, out of the blue (no pun intended). I used it faithfully through the rest of the school year, and even took it with me to CCSU until I got pregnant. For some reason, it was saved with a bunch of school supplies I had somehow saved when I moved out of my parents' house in 2012.
I rediscovered the holepunch when I was reorganizing myself and beginning my writing career. It had seen better days. The plastic is breaking off the metal. I stored it in a drawer, taken out on occasion for oddball things, or, most recently, to complete my chore with Calvin's pictures. It has seen a lot of lifetimes. The passage of time has been nostalgic and kind, and it is cherished as immensely as the giver himself.
I lost track of Mr. Nave after 2018. I found out that he had accounts at the bank I worked at, and I was ordered by my supervisor to cut ties or lose my job. My manager found out because he listened to my call and wondered why I would transfer a customer to another agent when I could handle it myself.
But that's another story for another day.
And that is what I was thinking about: time. It's fleeting. It's short. And nobody is getting any younger. It's up to you to decide the future and how time should treat you. Are you going to abuse yourself? Drugs, alcohol, starvation, risks? Are you going to take care of yourself and see yourself in twenty years, radiant and beautiful? And I don't mean a body either - it's your soul.
I could have been a drug addict without knowing how or why. As I wrote this, I saw clearer where I could have gone wrong and how my husband (then boyfriend) saved me. The urge to not run away may have kept me away, but it was a gilded age with its own secrets. The passage of time is healing it, little by little. I might be broken still, just like the holepunch, but we still hold up strongly.
I hope to meet Mr. Nave again and explain everything to him. I want to hug him and tell him how much he impacted my life and what his lessons meant to me. The understanding and empathy he held helped me over the span of many years...and made part of the journey home gentler.
Namaste! Have a wonderful day!
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