I started packing my daughter’s lunch again this year. Somewhere around middle school, my kids had taken over primary responsibility for packing their lunches. But now my son is away at college, it’s my daughter’s senior year and she’s returned to school after 18 months of remote learning, and I am keenly aware of the fact that we soon will be empty-nesters. So packing her lunch just feels right.

We’ve settled in to a nice morning routine. I pack her lunch, we chat about our upcoming day, and I help her get out the door to school. Taking a page from my dad’s playbook, sometimes I’ll go out and warm up her car or scrape her windows.

Yesterday morning we were listening to KEXP over cantaloupe, and an old Lenny Kravitz song came on. Our day was now off to a great start! I thanked John Richards out loud, turned it up, and told my daughter of my Lenny memories. In what must have been my sophomore year in college, Lenny had just released his first album and was doing a publicity tour. He was doing an autograph session at Tower Records on The Ave of the University District in Seattle, barely a block from our apartment. My bestie/roommate was the driving force in getting us there, as she owned the album. There was a line that snaked along the aisles, and there he sat, at the rear of the store under a poster, oozing coolness. When it was our turn, we mumbled hello, Lenny signed her cassette tape, and we went on about our day, which likely included a muffin at Muffin Break, or a slice at Pag’s. Years later, I saw Lenny Kravitz in concert at the Paramount with my sister, and he was just as fabulous as I wanted him to be. I recall that he did a Jesus pose at center stage (which you absolutely should always do if you are a rock star), and the crowd went wild. My daughter chuckled at the story, and off she went.

I recently started my annual cleanout/purge/re-organize effort. I’ve previously admitted that I am a sentimental hoarder, and I have boxes of things from my childhood and young adult life. But I’m trying to be more intentional about what I save, so it was time to go through a bin of old high school items and see what could go. I had a box of old notes from friends that made for a hilarious afternoon of reading about things I had forgotten (oh, the drama of the senior year Homecoming dance! How on earth did we ever make it through?). Most were mundane day-to-day musings about lunch plans and classroom events, prompting my daughter to ask, “wait, did you write these during class?” I said of course we did (duh), and when you saw your friend in the hallway between classes, you would pass the note to them. It was the 1980’s version of texting, before anyone could envision that something like text messages would ever exist.

With my hoarding habit exposed, I was surprised when my daughter observed that it was cool that I have these physical items as a snapshot of my life back then. Her communications with her friends exist only in the ether of electronic messages, and there will be no box for her to sit and go through someday with her daughter on a rainy afternoon. I told her that she can always change that, and write a note or letter to her friends. Maybe she will.

I texted with my friend yesterday, asking if she remembered the Lenny autograph session (she did), but I forgot to ask if she still has the tape. I hope she does. I still buy physical copies of albums, and I have all of my old vinyl, CD, and cassette tapes. After going through the box of high school things, I tossed all of the notes from old boyfriends, but I ended up keeping the ones from my friends. And OF COURSE I have a box of letters from my college days — hometown news from my parents and younger sisters — that I will never get rid of. So look out, college kids and soon-to-be college kids who are related to me…..old school letters are coming your way.

With all of this nostalgia for pen and paper rattling in my head, I wrote a note to my daughter in our old write-and-pass-back journal from years ago. In honor of the tradition of high school note writing, I penned my first new entry with “W/B”, but of course was careful to include a notation to her, explaining that this means “write back”. And she did.