The other day I was at a friend’s house. He was looking for a corkscrew and couldn’t find it. Fumbling through one drawer he asked another friend to take a look in the junk drawer—pointing to one just down from where he was rummaging. “Junk drawer? That’s an intimate thing!” said the one to the other.  Filled with things too precious to discard but neither valued, neither useful nor useless—in some sense like the treasures tucked away by a child in a shoe box and shoved under the bed or buried by a tree in the back yard. They are like souvenirs taken from sojourns as though they were the deepening of childhood memories: sluggishly past traumas, whizzing by the mundane, dawdling in the company of the cherished and monumental, or just pebbles in shoes. Intimate perhaps because we often feel as though we are those junk drawers: cobbled together with miscellany that doesn’t quite seem to fit together, point to anything larger or say anything—anything; just a discarded mess of unattended to questions. Baubles.

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