Lockers
I was thinking the other day about lockers. Not your average, cubed gym locker, but those kind that you first got when you went into middle school. The one’s that you had throughout high school. Many of you (if you’re an American around my age) will remember watching “Saved by the Bell” and seeing those floor-length metal beacons of coolness that Zack Morris was somehow able to walk into one side of the hallway and then reappear on the other side through another locker. If you were in elementary school, then you probably dreamt of the day that you would have your very own locker- one which you could colonize and make your own in any way that you saw fit. You might have found yourself disappointed, like I was, when you found out that they were not floor length and they did not have secret passages in the back. Also, there was no Kelly Kapowski to be found anywhere.
You would write down that locker combination on the first day in your crisp new agenda or Trapper Keeper, but you would set about your morning trying to memorize the numbers, because the locker was your space, your little plot of land. The locker was chock full of manifest destiny.
There was an entire industry set up around locker-gear. It wasn’t enough to simply have the space. The locker needed multi-teir shelving that would somehow allow you to organize your academic life in ways that seemed impossible previously. You also had to have one of those plastic, magnetic boxes that went on the door so you could store away various designer pencils, erasers, pens, and perhaps some glue if some situation were to call for it. Maybe you’d have a mirror. If you were me, you had photos of various college football players running for touchdowns or throwing Hail Marys, strategically taped to the back wall of the locker, to the sides, to the door.
For some reason, I thought that the quality of my locker somehow said something about me. I had to have really good gear for my locker. I don’t know if anyone else felt this way. I do realize that not much has changed. I still sort of believe that I need things to be happy. Lots of things. Shiny, plastic things. I look back at the lockers of my younger days and I kind of laugh at what an idiot I was. I wonder if Older Tatum will do the same when he remembers this current version of myself? My guess is probably. 
