I have sorted out my life. Or so it feels. During the last week of August, my dad and I performed a major purge of items stored in his basement, where surprises—unexpected but familiar—had waited years in plastic containers and cardboard boxes.

This sort of work, as you probably know, is as much emotional as physical. Opening all of the above, one by one, I thought of a favorite line from Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”: “It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Layered here was not misery, as Larkin has it, but remnants of every phase of our life as a family—a happy one that has defied the bleak certainties of the poem, whatever its literary perfection and shock value.

Also layered: many phases of my own life well into adulthood. In decades of urban apartment living, I’ve never had a basement, so some of the flotsam and jetsam of those years had landed back in Michigan.

There were 30-year-old notebooks from graduate school, densely filled with notes and doodles. Books published by Poseidon Press, where I had my first job after college. Stoppard, Pinter, Fornés, and every other text from a contemporary drama course—but oddly nothing from any other college course. High school papers and report cards (“As a writer of prose fiction, Laura is talented and accomplished. As a literary analyst, she is just OK.”). Lions and tigers and my first teddy bear, Theodore. And in a chest, the tiny crocheted sweater I wore leaving Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital for the wider world in 1968.

As lived experience, the phases of my life have flowed into one another seamlessly. In the retrospect provided by their surviving relics, they stand out like concentric rings in a tree trunk—or strata in a coastal shelf. I thought about how much more had already been discarded than kept, a kind of editing of the past, and why I’d saved what I had.

What have you held on to from your life at UChicago, or elsewhere? We are always interested, and I’d bet that your fellow alumni are too. Write to us at uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.

Moving on up

It’s with great delight that I report the latest Magazine staff addition—and subtraction. Chandler A. Calderon, who has served as Alumni News editor with true distinction since 2022, took on a new role as senior writer in July. As we search for someone to fill her old shoes, you will be treated to more of Chandler’s sharp observation and vivid storytelling, beginning with “Crossover Artist” in this issue. Congratulations to her, and to us.