New year, old jeans

I have cracked open the vault of my twenty-five-year-old Ikea cabinetry left behind here while I shuttled about for the past ten or eleven years. The intention was to get rid of almost everything to make more storage room, but so much of this stuff is museum-quality and historically interesting that it's hard to let it all go. I've found those weird cardboard boxes that replaced pencil cases for a while in grade five and six. I've found a Vuarnet sticker that no doubt came with a since deceased T-shirt. I've found Expo '86 memorabilia. I've found my early photographic efforts with a Kodak disc camera ... lots of decapitated relatives. In my closet I came across this artifact, likely from 1989 or 1990: jeans hacked off and hand-tapered with loving care. Notice the way they conform to the calf and hug the ankle. I can no longer come close to doing them up, so you just get my feet.

I also uncovered disturbing evidence that my entry into the gifted program in grade three may have been the result of some finagling on my parents' part. At the age of eight, Mozart was already composing some of his more memorable music. Me, I was creating such masterpieces as "A Man in a Boat," meticulously dating them (Dec. 31, 1984) and signing them to be sure noone else could claim credit for my genius. The fact that this sorry little construction of cardboard, pipecleaner, felt and walnut shell is now twenty-one years old, and that it survived this long, against all possible odds, makes me reluctant to destroy it. But this sort of thing can be held against you.