A Room Changes

When I look back at my childhood bedroom through the eyes of an adult, I tend to remember it as a mess.

A dogpile of stuffed animals, originally arranged in relatively neat rows like some kind of misfit choir, grown progressively less organized for each time I’d pulled one from the mix to play, or the times I’d fallen into them for an ultra-clumsy semblance of crowd-surfing—not to mention my mother fumbling through the crowd to get to the closet behind it where she still kept some of her work clothes, an ironing board, and extra luggage.

My bed—-made only so often and thoroughly enough so my father wouldn’t give me a hard time about leaving it a mess, though I failed to understand why it should matter if I made my bed when only I would use it, and I’d only end up messing it up again.

And papers. Papers everywhere, from early attempts at writing, from constantly drawing. Magazines and books adding to this vaguely post-apocalyptic wasteland of abandoned projects, none of which I had the heart to throwaway.

There was a point in my late-elementary, early-middle school years when I did begin to, periodically take a crack at clearing the space. I recall a particular instance feeling inspired by a round of listening to The Indigo Girls’ “Hammer and Nail” and putting an earnest effort forth to get the space cleared out.

Attempts like this tended to end in one of two ways. The insurmountable dust that had collected on the clutter and leaked through to the carpet below overwhelmed my sensitive allergies until I had a constant stream of liquid snot streaming from my nose and felt compelled to stop. Or I uncovered some project I’d left behind years before that I felt compelled to read through or pick up the work on, overtaken by some combination of nostalgia and creative drive, and thus utterly distracted from the original task of tidying my room.

Eventually, my father took control, as I’ve written about earlier and helped me clean the room, and while it wasn’t always entirely clean in the aftermath—particularly with my habit of shoving clutter into my nightstand drawer or under the bed—the room never reached the same disaster levels it had once occupied for a period of years.

And yet, when I put aside adult practicalities, when I try to drop into the headspace of someone twenty-five to thirty years my junior, I remember the room differently. A mess, sure. But also a place of possibility.

I remember the toys that never became canonized. While my sister and I named the majority of our stuffed animals, constructed personalities and interpersonal (or animal?) relationships between them, and while I played with my wrestling action figures on a regular basis, and arguably for long after they were age-appropriate, there were other relegated to decoration. A foot-and-a-half tall silver robot, for example. Or a hard plastic puzzle, not unlike a Rubik’s Cube but meant to lay flat that I never figured out, though I still dedicated a few minutes to it every few months when I stumbled upon it.

I remember the simultaneous joy and disappointment in finding the badly wrinkled remains an old marker drawing that I was proud of—at once marveling at the discovery and an early sense of nostalgia (yes, nostalgia for something only a year or two old is absurd, but when that marks a greater percentage of your entire life span, it’s not as ridiculous), and furious at myself for letting it get crushed in the broader mess, so that it would never be in pristine condition again.

I remember the tape recorder. Not the fancier “boom boxes” I would have in years to follow, but the single cassette recorder that I could use to record my own voice or, far more spectacularly, the music from my clock radio.

And I suppose all of this amounts to a sense of wonder. For while I had the same bedroom from my earliest memories until I turned left home for college at seventeen, it remains at least two distinct settings in my mind, in a way that I imagine it does not for my parents. When I was a teenager (and in revisiting the house after I moved out) it’s a small space that I was grateful to call my own—a retreat from my father’s racket, a place to write and read and do homework and daydream unobserved. But in childhood, the room was enormous, divided into sectors of work space and bookshelves, the dresser where I kept most of my clothes, the stuffed animal area, my bed. In those messy, cluttered days it was more than a private space, it was a private world.

It never occurred to me that that might change.