One day recently, my sister Lee announced, “Hey, I’ve got something for you.”
She fished around in her purse. A few seconds later, she pulled out a silver bracelet and dropped it into my right hand. It coiled slickly into my palm like a metal snake.
I knew immediately what it it was: my fifth-grade ID bracelet, an artifact from my childhood that I hadn’t seen in over a half century.
“Wow,” I said.
“I found it in a drawer,” Lee explained.
“It must have been in some of Mom’s stuff,” I said. (Our mother died in 2006.)
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It quickly brought to mind a shy, 10-year-old “me,” circa 1968. I would have been a fifth-grader at Riverside Elementary School in Maury County, Tennessee. The bracelet was probably a Christmas or birthday gift; I don’t remember which.
“Riverside” was no misnomer. The banks of the Duck River were only yards away from the school, which was prone to flooding. There were literal high-water marks on the wall in the school cafeteria with the years scribbled in pencil beside them.
The school was located near a meat packing plant — we called it “the packing house” — where livestock were slaughtered. The fact that the playground was saturated with the sounds and smells of dead and dying animals didn’t seem to bother anyone — in fact, I don’t ever remember it being mentioned.
Last week, I took the ID bracelet and draped it across my 65-year-old wrist. The fact that it actually still fits my arm was a bit of a puzzle, but then I remembered that the style back in the 1960s was to wear ID bracelets loosely. Throwing a baseball, for example, might cause the bracelet to fly off one’s arm.
The purpose of the bracelet, back in the day, was not to express personal style but to attract a “girlfriend.” My crushes that year were a girl in my grade named Beth who had raven hair, and Goldie Hawn, the actress who used to be a go-go dancer on the network sketch show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” Both were equally unattainable. In fact, it became clear to me quite quickly that my ID bracelet wasn’t going to just jump off my wrist and onto the arm of a pretty girl, so I immediately stopped wearing it.
It’s amazing to me how an object like this ID bracelet can actually carry anxiety across decades. Had this bracelet been sitting in a dark drawer for 55 years waiting to remind me of my bashful, 10-year-old-self?
In something akin to an act of defiance, I decided to wear the bracelet to work one day last week. I thought it might stir even more memories about my childhood. I’m going through a period, here on the precipice of my golden years, of trying to think clearly about different phases in my life. What was it about my 10-year-old self that I could harvest and use to help me understand my life story, I wondered.
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Once I placed the year I received the bracelet, 1968, and the setting, Riverside School, it was like opening a spigot of memories.
I remember being fast on the playground, and nobody could beat me in a game of chase — which is unfortunately not a varsity sport in high school. I was left-handed and wrote all my class notes in block letters, not cursive. I felt bad about this until I noticed my left-handed father’s handwriting was exactly the same. I had a badly chipped front tooth, which was a constant source of shame.
I ate a lot of SweeTarts candy, which I just recently learned is an anti-anxiety hack. People are eating extremely sour candy these days to counteract panic attacks because the brain apparently can’t handle two sensory overloads at once. (Warning: I am not a doctor, so don’t quit your meds to try this.)
I also distinctly remember thinking as a kid that 1968 was a crazy year. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated that year, and protests over the Vietnam War were nightly news on TV. I remember getting sucked into the headlines that year in a way that probably influenced my choice of careers.
Perhaps the ID bracelet has performed its mission after all, finding its way back to me after all these years to remind me of my childhood.
Isn’t that the point of an ID bracelet, to remind you who you are?
If I could send a message back to myself at 10, it would be that there would be pretty girls in his future, that his block letters were the early expressions of a professional writer and that his anxiety would one day blossom into confidence.
“Sleep well, little man,” I would whisper in the boy’s ear at bedtime. “Your day will come.”
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.