The turkey’s in the oven and my uncle is passed out in front of the TV. I head to my room to pass the time until dinner’s ready (which happens at 3:42PM every year without fail, because we eat whenever the turkey’s done, and no matter when we begin cooking the bird, it will finish at 3:42PM on the dot). After some aimless rifling around, I stumble upon a literal time capsule: a green IKEA storage box filled with everything from old letters and mix CDs to prom photos.
My mom, wary from a lifetime of packing and moving, is obsessed with throwing out anything that doesn’t immediately declare itself as useful. She’s the OG Marie Kondo before Kondo-ing ever became a thing. Unfortunately, this makes my personal sentimental goods vulnerable targets to her purging, and every visit home is filled with at least one argument centered around her trying to throw away my high school yearbooks. (“There’s four of them,” she says.)
The box, I decide, will be added to the diminutive collection of things I’ll always fight to keep. The list is as follows:
Space Jam on VHS
COME ON AND SLAM
We really have no means of watching this as we don’t even have a VHS player at home anymore, but I’ll never turn my back on Michael and the Toon Squad. I’ll keep this for as long as I have to — better yet, I’m giving this to my unborn daughter on her wedding day.