Piles on the floor of artifacts from dresser drawers
Sometimes I think my brain is just a big, messy closet.

Earlier this week I saw Star Wars. It's been a while since I saw a movie with Ewan McGregor in it, and for no particular reason, it took me on a little nostalgia trip that had absolutely nothing to do with the movie.

I have only one explanation for this: I come from a long line of pack rats.

My mother still finds pictures that I drew when I was four stuffed among ancient financial documents in filing cabinets in back rooms, or in cookbooks on the top shelves of the kitchen. If you pull something out of a closet, you risk upsetting the delicate balance that keeps everything from pouring out in an avalanche.

I acknowledge that I have, to a lesser extent, inherited these tendencies. My artifacts, however, aren't as old, and they lie much closer to the surface. Hence, in my periodic rummagings for objects I need but can't quite find, I sometimes open a box filled with tangible evidence of things I'd forgotten. On these occasions, I almost invariably sit down, pull out everything inside and take a little side trip into recollection. Then I pack everything back up, resume my hunt for my original quarry and forget it all again.

My brain, I feel, is arranged a similar way; every so often something I see or do or read or write takes me on a search through its closets and drawers, where I pick through boxes and rediscover all the memories I'd squirreled away and forgotten I had.

The box that Star Wars caused me to open was the Ewan McGregor box. The Ewan McGregor box has little to do with the actor himself and a lot to do with memories involving things Ewan McGregor was involved in. When I start rooting around in the Ewan McGregor box, I remember how A Life Less Ordinary, in its extreme weirdness, was one of Becca's and my favorite comfort movies when we were roommates and how she had a poster from it on her wall. I remember how Ewan McGregor was on her list of the top five men she'd want to date if time and reality were no object (the others were the young George Harrison, Beck, Fox Mulder and Benicio Del Toro). I remember how most of us regard Evy's nonconformist denial of Ewan McGregor's hotness as evidence of her impossibly finicky and unpredictable taste. I remember deciding, shortly after I moved north, that I wanted to watch Trainspotting but being unable to find a video store that had it because I barely knew my way around town. I also remember being grateful, when I finally did see it, that I wasn't watching it alone; that scene with the baby might just have been too much for me.

The thing about the boxes in my brain is that they're much deeper than the ones in my real closet. Bottomless, really. Once I've pulled out all the Ewan McGregor stuff on top, lots of other memories underneath come into focus again; memories about who I was, who I loved, who I hated; about how Becca used to make me tea before our morning classes and the day she stepped on a dead bird in bare feet; about how we snuck into the hot tub of the hotel next door, and the way we nicknamed the problematic males in each other's lives and wrote them on the blacklist that hung on our wall.

These things will lie scattered all over my mental floor for a while, and suddenly I'll be startled to notice that I'm sitting among them. As I begin to put them away and return to the present, I'll wonder how I got there. And then I remember: Oh yeah. Star Wars.

It's an odd cross-reference that leads you from Star Wars to Old Crushes. But mine does, because this is how the mind of a pack rat works; we're wired with the archivist's instinct for preservation, if not for order. Memory is porous and things slip through. If you don't save the evidence, you might not even remember you've forgotten -- and these bits and pieces I've put away are things I can't always remember but just can't bear to forget.

Death Cab for Cutie, "We Laugh Indoors"

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