clippings tender_square brea’s been digging around the windsor star archives for anything she can find about our family. she’s been sending me screenshots of any results with our last name. last night i received a text saying, “see, you used to be hilarious seester…” attached was a photo of a joke i wrote for the paper when i was seven that got me published. i also scored a windsor star button and stationary set as a prize, which i now remember excitedly receiving in the mail when i was a kid. my joke: question: why did the baseball player bring a rope to the game? answer: he wanted to tie the score. (ba dum tsh) i texted brea, “why do you say ‘used to be’ as if i am not hilarious anymore!!” along with a judge judy gif of her looking like she’s absolutely had it. in another find, my mom is interviewed by the paper when brea and i auditioned to dance for "the nutcracker." brea was 5, i was 7; it was our first audition. three hundred other kids were trying out (we never made the cut). “they both like being on stage, they love the recitals,” my mom told the reporter. “they don’t get nervous.” 211019 ... raze years ago, we were at juniper books when my dad found a newspaper from the early seventies. he had a hunch there might be an advertisement in there for the store his grandfather owned before i was born. it took a while, but he found it, and i could tell from the way he smiled seeing that monochrome relic was as good as stepping back in time and working in that store again. there are things you don't save. an article about a kid you went to grade school with who jumped in front of a train when he was fourteen, with a picture of his friends who used to be your friends standing on the tracks he was torn apart on, looking lost. an image you can still call back if you think about it long enough, though you know time has chipped away at the details. the one about the boy who bullied you and told you he was going to break into your house and murder your whole family while you slept, who fell off his bicycle, scraped his knee, and died of necrotizing fasciitis before he was old enough to shave. and then there are the things you never knew you lost that are returned to you by luck or fate or some strange dance that's going on all around you even when you aren't moving an inch. 211019 what's it to you? who go blather from