Kick Me by Paul Feig Page A

know what they are anyway.”
    After that, I vowed never to seek out my Christmas presents again. However, within weeks, the lure of the backs of my parents’ closets proved too strong to resist and I returned to my prying ways, justifying my snooping by reassuring myself that I wasn’t looking for presents—I was just being nosy. I couldn’t help it. It was just too tempting. Our house always seemed to offer up a never-ending wealth of poorly hidden treasures. My mother was a bit of a pack rat, a trait that I have inherited from her in spades. I am loath to throw out even the most disposable of items, for fear that some day in the near future, I will (a) find myself in need of an old
Time
magazine even though its contents are much more conveniently archived on the Internet, (b) figure out a way to refill and repair that old disposable “Makin’ Bacon” lighter I found several years ago, or (c) mourn the nostalgic boost I’d miss if I threw away that stack of completely out-of-focus photos of my backyard taken for insurance purposes. No, mother and son Feig would save everything, and I was always stumbling upon bizarre items from my past in our closets.
    My mom had saved the first book I ever wrote, an obtuse little tome titled “BananaLand” that I penned in the first grade and then tried to bind into a book using construction paper and a stapler. Unfortunately, I laid it out completely backward, so that it had to be read from back to front like the Torah. I found my old handprint plaques from preschool, uncomfortable little craft items made out of plaster and spray-painted gold. I found my mother’s old mortarboard from her high school graduation, and, when no one was home, I would parade around the house wearing it and carrying a rolled-up comic book that served as my diploma from the College for Gifted Goofballs. It always made me happy that my mom saved everything I ever did, because there’s nothing more terrifying to me than people throwing out your past while you’re still alive. After you’re dead, I guess they can just toss everything on the scrap heap, but I know I don’t want to be an old man who sits around saying, “You should have seen me when I was a kid. Man, was I good-lookin’.” With photographic evidence available, I could quickly be brought back to my senses despite the onslaught of my aged delusion.
    Even though my dad was the “if you don’t use it for twentyfour hours it goes in the trash” sort of guy, it was actually his few saved items that offered the greatest treasure-hunting finds. When I was seven, I would frequently sneak nervously into his den, a room that sounds much more ostentatious than it actually was. It was the smallest room in our already small house, a place where he could balance his store’s accounting books in peace. He had a tiny desk in there, a small countertop, and shelves along one wall that Mr. Lufthauser from down the street had built for him. Into the middle of it all my dad had crammed in a large reclining chair, where he’d spend his days off trying to catch up on politics and end up open-mouthed and drooling after falling asleep two minutes into an attempted reading of the Sunday
Detroit News.
But it was the closet next to his chair that was the gateway to adventure every time I was brave enough to venture inside it. It had sliding aluminum doors that had been painted orange to match the rest of the burnt umber and dark-paneled room. I always remember the forbidden thrill of putting my hands on that cold door and slowly sliding it to the side as it rumbled with a metallic shudder. Even though I knew nobody was home, I’d get completely paranoid and have to run out into the living room several times to convince myself that the rumbling door noise hadn’t masked the sound of my dad’s station wagon pulling into our driveway. Then, on hands and knees, I’d slowly work my way into the piles of old brown paper grocery bags in which my dad had stored