My mother is in a de-cluttering phase. She has been clearing out space in the attic, and has been telling me for months that she had some boxes she wanted me to go through to see if there was anything in there I wanted to keep. We were in town last weekend for our annual Fourth of July family reunion, and there would at last be time for me to rummage through the boxes — there must have been seven or eight of them crammed full of items that were once obviously considered too precious to throw away. At a yard sale, all of this stuff combined would not fetch more than two bucks. And yet, some of it is priceless.

As is always the case with such keepsakes, it was more interesting to try to locate the item in time and place and then try to remember — or imagine — what possessed me to want to keep it in the first place. There were two blue ribbons won for works of art I created when I was 7 years old. Oddly, the artworks are long gone, but I wanted to hang onto those blue ribbons. I didn’t want to think much about what this might say about me. On the other hand, unless you bake a mean strawberry pie, how many chances are you ever going to have to win blue ribbons in your life? There were stacks and stacks of magazines, of course, old Rolling Stones and Sports Illustrateds from the ‘70s and ‘80s, even some professional wrestling magazines with the American Dream Dusty Rhodes and the Nature Boy Ric Flair on the covers. One night after everyone went to bed, I checked eBay to see if any of these had possibly become valuable collector’s items. For a fleeting moment, I pictured myself selling the entire collection to a nostalgic millionaire for $25,000. But this picture vanished as quickly as it had formed, once I saw that even the most valuable magazines in my collection were for sale for less than five bucks (and usually less than three). With patience and hard work, I might take my magazines and make a hundred dollars, if I sold them all.

Well, on to other boxes. Old yearbooks. In the seventh grade, autographers had taken to calling me Foxy Coxy, a name that I still rather fancy but seldom hear anymore. Upon review of the commentary of my peers, I was reminded that seventh grade is a time of preposterous hyperbole. Robin, for instance, said she would see me that summer. (She wouldn’t.) Peggy regretted we hadn’t gotten together that year, but suggested that we might next year. (We didn’t.) Ricky reminded me of all the daring adventures we had participated in during history class. (We got C’s in Citizenship.) Mark advised me not to catch a venereal disease over the summer. (As if ...) Donald said, simply, “Raise hell, beanpole,” an allusion no doubt to my slight frame. (However much hell can be raised playing whiffleball in your grandma’s yard with the boy next door, I raised it that summer.)

I put the yearbook back in the box and opened another. Now here was something really special, from even further back. It appears that in the fifth grade — in the first week of October in 1972, to be precise — I was named “Student Of The Week” in Pattyrae Busic’s class. Consequently, everyone in the class penned a paragraph describing why I, Foxy Coxy, was deserving of such an honor, and I wrote a paragraph myself describing how it felt to be the recipient of such an award.

Mark Ketchum: “Chris is a good writer. He’s smart two (sic). And I like him. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. Do you?”

Alison Greer: “He doesn’t yell when the teacher is out.”

Brant Burgiss: “I think it’s nice to have Chris as a friend because he supplies me with paper.”

Bracky Bickerstaff: “He is good at square dancing. Onced (sic) he won third place in a square dancing contest.”

Sharon Henry: “He’s not a sore loser or anything because when they lost the game, he didn’t pout or complain.”

A few themes emerged in the respondents’ essays. Apparently, Robin Patton was my girlfriend that year. I liked the Dallas Cowboys. I had pretty good to excellent handwriting. I enjoyed playing football (no one said I was actually good at it, though). I liked to talk, sometimes at my own peril. I had a sister, a brother, and a hamster.

In my own essay, I struggled to capture the pure exhilaration of being named Student of the Week, and obviously worried about forgetting to thank all of those who had made it possible: “It feels wonderful to be Student of the Week. It is an honor. I have had one heck of a time trying to find a picture. It is nice to be it. I like Mark H. and Bracky B. and Brant B. (Jimmy and Tim and Barry and Stewart). Especially, No, I can’t tell. I like Steve, to. Well lets just say I like everybody in the room.”

All people should get a chance to be Student of the Week sometime in their lives. In Pattyrae Busic’s class in 1972, everyone did. And nearly 40 years later, they are still talking about it.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at jchriscox@bellsouth.net.)