Our microwave oven died. That's OK because we've had it nearly 30 years and we have three more in the basement. My mother-in-law went through major appliances the way I go through harmonicas. She was always upgrading and replacing her gear. So I have three nearly new microwave ovens in the basement.

The problem is that my mother-in-law died ten years ago and most of these microwaves date from the 1970s. It's not that they are old, but they have 30 years of accumulated junk piled on top of them. I moved into this house in 1978 and they have not been moved since.

Now, the story! When we moved into this house, I put my “treasure chest� in the basement on the bottom shelf against the wall. Inside it were my writings and notebooks dating from around 1965 to 1973. I have not seen them since I moved into the house. The chest is a heavy wooden Olive Oil box that I found in the Clarkstown Sanitary Landfill in the mid 1960s. I carved my name on it, put antique hinges and an antique hasp on it, varnished it with spar varnish, and locked it with a 100 year old padlock. (That lock is now nearly 150 years old). I still have the key.

I had to clean up the basement, rearranging junk and throwing out old crap to get at the microwaves. I also was able to get at the treasure chest.

I spent a couple of hours last night reading stuff that I had written in high school and college. There was stuff that I don't remember writing, like a six thousand word story still in its return envelope with a rejection note from The New Yorker – post mark 1968. There was a 9000 word hand written story in the Cthulhu Mythos style of H.P. Lovecraft – more than 60 pages of tightly handwritten prose in a Cooper Union notebook.

I found “Third Avenue Blues� – about 200 lines of a poem that is way cooler than I remember, but the rough spot in the middle made remember that I wanted to fix that part someday.

There were three spiral notebooks, written in a younger hand from my early high school days, which I estimate is 20,000 words of a novel about 13 year old kids in a dark fantasy world. I remember scenes from the book, but I will have to read it again to find out what it is about. I don't think that I finished it. I read some stuff in it and the descriptions blew me away.

I will go through it and see if anything can be rewritten and sold. I would like to validate this younger version of myself by getting some stories published. Submitting stories in 1970 was much harder for me than it is now. I could not type well and I could not spell to save my life. My grammar and sentence structure, though, seem much better and the style was smooth and rich. 35 years of technical writing and programming have hardened my style. On the other hand, Word 2000 fixes all of my spelling mistakes and finds most of the grammatical errors.

I would like to collaborate with this kid and get him published. I don't think that he would have minded.