They don’t call it a junk drawer for nothing

A couple of weeks back, I sorted through my main junk drawer.

Oh, I go to this particular junk drawer all the time since I shrewdly decided to always keep a comb there.  But I seldom go through it. Apparently, I keep a lot of things that I’m always looking for there, as well. As in:

• A couple of small pocketbook-sized hairbrushes
• More combs than I thought were in there
• A couple of pairs of nail clippers
• Several tubes of lip goop/lip balm/Chapstick/whatever. Included in the bunch was a tube of Napoleon Dynamite lip balm which, given that the movie was out 10 years ago, must be ossified by now. I didn’t check; for that one, I just chucked. There was also an extremely cute little travel jar of Vaseline. (If you haven’t figured it out by now, I have perpetually dry lips.)
• Three glass cases
• Three pens
• Two notebooks
• Two thumbdrives
• Two sheathes for long-gone umbrellas
• Four packets of Kleenex
• Two padlocks for the gym, which I no longer need because they’ve replaced BYOL with a terrible system that pretty much guarantees you’ll never be able to leave your pocketbook in a locker that locks.

And that’s just the jumble of stuff I’m always looking for. In addition to all those goodies, I found:

• A gift receipt for a book my cousin gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago
• A pair of black shoelaces
• A diagnostic fuse kit, I think for a car. (What was I doing with that?)
• A quarter-roll of painter’s blue tape
• A knee brace and an ankle brace
• Iron cleaner
• A key chain
• A police whistle
• Hand warmers
• A Wash ‘n Dri
• Two wallets
• A roll of “traveler’s toilet paper”, which I will never need because I always have a Kleenex packet
• A pocket protector with a picture of an armadillo on it
• My niece Caroline’s birth certificate
• Twelve train schedules dating back to 2009 for a whole bunch of different lines
• Two bottles of bed bug protector
• Instructions for long-gone clocks and other small appliances, some of which I don’t even remember having
• Two hair rollers (sometimes I throw a curler in the back of my hair when it’s drying so that it will flip down; the days – make that nights - when I’d actually sleep with curlers in my hair are decades in the past)

But my favorite find in the junk drawer was a bunch of holy cards, including one from the May 17, 1953 Our Lady of the Angles Holy Name Society Communion Breakfast. Since I wasn’t there, I must have gotten this one from my father. Wonder if this was the Communion Breakfast that JFK spoke at…

All I can say is, they don’t call it a junk drawer for nothing.