What is now a long time ago I went to England and northern France on a high school AP European History trip in my senior year. I was still newly eighteen and mildly obsessed with blank-verse poetry. By which I mean I was writing a lot of it (badly), and was attempting (in vain) to corral what other members of our out-of-school book club[1] that were on the trip to write stories that we could tell each other on the long drive down to Canterbury.[2] Suffice to say I was the only one who finished the assignment, having hand written pages and pages of semi-sensible blank verse (or was I trying heroic couplets? I have no idea.) in a spiral-bound notebook I wish I still had.

It was, as all high school trips are, an odd collection of people. I had two or three very good friends on the trip, one or two folks I was friendly with from choir, a few kids in other grades with whom I was acquainted, and then a bunch of people I either knew by sight or was simply in class with. I was more or less (I hope) friendly with everyone and — being somewhat extroverted — became closer a few of the folks that were on the trip. One of these was a guy I’d been in classes with for a long time, with whom I was friendly, but not someone I’d ever spent much time with. His name was Steve.

Steve was smart, and good at the kind of thinking and calculation and science that I was pretty shit at. But we both liked history and sort of arcane things and we had a grand old time at the British Museum. I don’t really remember anymore what we had talked about going there and back and whatever else, but I remember a strong fondness for him; we didn’t really keep in any touch after we went off to college, save maybe running into each other at some party or other a few years after graduation, but at the end of the trip, waiting in one of the airports on the way back, he pulled a Rosetta Stone mousepad out of his backpack and gave it to me. Whether this was in pure friendship or as thanks for letting him use my cell phone to call his family a couple of times over the course of the trip, I’m not sure,[3] but it caught me off guard (as someone who is not really a gift-giver himself, nor a particularly comfortable gift-receiver), and was super nice, and anyway that mousepad has been on nearly every iteration of "my desk" since, through college, back home, and how-many apartments.

Unfortunately my brother sent me a very nice, fancy, has-a-lot-of-buttons-I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with mouse so I could try a little better to keep up when we play video games, and it doesn’t work with the mousepad, or at least not well. Long gone are the days of the rolling-ball mice and maybe the laser gets confused on the semi-reflective surface of the pad. And it’s intermittent that it doesn’t work so well — sometimes, I think, it’s the batteries, but then I "turn it off and on again" and it works, but in general when I remove the pad it works best. And so it might be time to put the pad into the "technology box" in the closet for another day.

And I’m a little sad about this.

Not, of course, in a sad-sad way, but I’m inclined toward nostalgia, particularly about tools I’ve spent a lot of time using, and I’ll be a little sad not to occasionally notice the mousepad as such and remember Steve, take a minute to wonder where and how the hell he’s doing,[4] but then, perhaps the absence of the mousepad will remind me of him and that trip anyway.

If I were smarter or if I didn’t have to go do my day job I might come up with some grand metaphor about how the Rosetta stone serves as a translation layer between my past and present, while keeping in mind the intermediary steps along the way, mapping one mode and cycle of life to another, but — 

Mostly it’s just a real fucking cool mousepad, and maybe one of the best unexpected gifts I’ve ever gotten.

1. We started this book club in earnest teenage rebellion against our English teacher, who was insisting on making us read Chaucer and Shakespeare and that Andrew Marvell poem instead of the hip stuff we wanted to be reading like Salinger’s Nine Stories and The Waste Land. It was a whole thing, and went on for a remarkably long time as an actual book club before (d)evolving into something like a late-night Denny’s club.
2. Because, you know, Chaucer. Even if what we really wanted to be reading was… I think Abby was into Robert Lowell at the time, and maybe I had just read A Farewell to Arms. Greg was maybe into Plato? I remember having lots of discussions with him about education and pedagogy on a choir trip.
3. I had been under the apparently mistaken assumption that we’d bought international minutes for my phone plan; this was not the case and the bill required a conversation. It’s important to note that Steve’s calls were a drop in the bucket; mostly I was on the phone with the girl I was infatuated with at the time.
4. I did contact him a few years ago, and we chatted for a little bit, but I have no memory anymore about what he’s up to, where he lives, etc., and I am sure he has no clue I am in Boston.