Michael D. Davis.

There are scraps of paper adorned with my doodles and scribbles strewn throughout the house like other homes have dust bunnies because I very rarely throw a drawing away. I don’t throw a lot of things away.

I would say it is one part insanity and one part strategy. Okay, probably 60-40. The insanity part I get from my family. My Ma is a self proclaimed hoarder.

She has random old half torn envelopes with quickly squiggled recipes on them from before I was born, having rarely utilized any of the notepads or tablets that she has boxes of. My Father is a pack rat. I’ve seen him pick up old broken and rusted wrenches and pocket knives off the side of the road.

If you live in Toledo, you’ve probably seen him do that too. My sister is neither of these things, she is the only person I know who regularly organizes and deletes photos from her phone.

I also get this from my grandmother. I used to say she was nuts. Nowadays, I say she had Alzheimer’s.

Either way, when I used to go visit her in my youth she always gave me a present. She gave me bundled up bunches of pens. Dead pens. My Grandmother never gave me a single pen that had a drop of ink in it. I don’t know why, she was nuts, but I still have them…somewhere.

Years later, I found that one of my absolute favorite mediums to work with is simple ballpoint pens. I would get a cheap pen and drain the thing of ink in a week.

As I was going through these pens like a whale through water, I just kept setting them aside. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. So, I got a shadow box.

My sister drilled a hole in the top of it and every time I emptied a pen I dropped it in the box. A year or so back the box filled to capacity and broke. I still didn’t throw the pens away. They are in boxes, mugs, and jars. I have to this day never knowingly thrown a pen away.

Now that’s the insanity part. The hoarder part. But there is also a strategy to this, and it comes from my old science teacher.

In eighth grade middle school, I had a horrible science teacher, one of those brutal for the sake of being brutal types.

Well, I missed a lot of school because I was constantly getting sick. I would be there one day and sick the next. So, I was constantly falling behind on assignments which he didn’t care for, but I passed his class, even if it was by the skin of my teeth.

Ninth grade meant high school, and I would be rid of him, but no. He transferred to the high school and became my teacher again.

Ninth went a lot like eighth. At the end of the year, I was heading towards flunking science when he told me to stay after class. He said to get out any assignment that I still had.

I opened my blue trapper keeper with Foghorn Leghorn doodled on it, and took out every science worksheet and packet I had. Some were done, some were graded, some were blank. He looked through them, picked out a couple that I hadn’t turned in, and said, “Boy are you lucky. This is just enough for you to pass my class.” I could see in his eyes as he said it that he desperately wanted me out of his class. The dislike had been mutual.

I passed his class, and at the end of that year and every school year after that, when school was let out for summer, I would take everything I still had in my trapper keeper and put it in a bundled up plastic bag in the closet. I feared that I’d come back the following fall and some teacher would say to me, you never turned in this assignment so you have to take my class again. I am pretty sure I still have a dollar store sack of homework from my last year at STC, just in case.

This still applies to me today. I have a box marked “NEWSPAPER S***” which holds every notebook, agenda, and scrap of paper that I’ve accumulated from my job at the paper. I have two years’ worth of county supervisor and city council meeting recordings backed up. There’s always that chance that someone will say I wrote something wrong or challenge me on a quote. In that case, I can just look up the date and listen to the meeting to know I’m right.

I know this isn’t what my science teacher was trying to teach me. He was probably trying to teach me science or something. However, it was a lesson that has stuck with me and shaped how I’ve done everything since.