Legacy

A couple years ago, my friend and I found an old-fashioned wooden blanket trunk at a flea market, which my friend was immediately excited about purchasing for her room. When we opened it to see if there was anything inside, I was even more fascinated by the contents: layers upon layers of photographs, letters, drawings, and documents, all of which looked old and faded.

We rifled through the documents, quickly ascertaining that they belonged to no one we’d ever heard of. But we went ahead and purchased the trunk together with its contents and lugged the hefty forty-pound trunk the two miles back to my apartment, from Clark Park, in the rain.

Later that night, after a performance of our show, we found ourselves back in my living room, digging through the magical box of history. We organized it by type of artifact, and then used the captions and text to start putting pieces together, following the trail of relationships, family members, and timelines. We hopped on the computer and searched recurring names to see if we could find the people today to return things too. Eve was obsessed with the idea of making a reddit to see if the internet hive mind could hunt people down, but I didn’t care much about that part – I just wanted to understand people’s stories, as much as I could from these small windows into their lives.

Birth announcement, Baptism announcement, and young adulthood of Carol Ann Darnell

It shouldn’t have been a surprise when, two years later, I ended up following a similar course for my undergraduate senior project in creating an archival history of the Drexel Players. I spent many long hours reading old newspaper articles, rifling through a delicate scrapbooks from decades past, scouring playbills for names and juicy director’s notes, and taking notes on every college yearbook ever published, all to frame a story that had been largely lost from memory in the intervening years.

I’ve never been able to explain why projects like these draw me in so much. With the Players, it was easy to use the excuse that learning about our history might inspire ideas for us for the future. But with the trunk I had no such excuse. And in both cases, it was more for my own interests than for any such lofty reason; I was fascinated by finding the same names again and again, by charting the course of individuals through time and in learning something of who they were and what they did.

I think, if I’m honest with myself, I’m drawn to other people’s histories because I hope someone else will be drawn to mine.

I try my best to make it easy for them. I’ve scrapbooked for years, created photobooks of trips and special events, and saved the programs and posters of every show or project I’ve worked on. I religiously ensure that someone, whether it’s me or not, is taking photos of important events. When I carefully upload, tag, and caption all my photos on Facebook, it’s not in hopes that I’ll get hundreds of “likes” to create a shiny happy picture of my life; it’s to create a detailed catalog of my life. I love handwritten letters, and I still print hard copies of photos so there’s physical evidence of my story too.

I like to think that doing these things is just the right trail of breadcrumbs for someone to follow in the future. Ideally, of course, my family and friends will keep and treasure these memories. But even if they don’t,  I have a romantic vision that no matter who I am or become, someone somewhere will find a bin of my belongings at a flea market someday and think it’s worth staying up til 3 in the morning trying to piece together who I am, or who I was. I like to think even if I’m not famous or well-known, that my legacy will live on somewhere, somehow.