Coming from a family of diabetics, I never really ate a lot of sugar, but sometimes my mother would buy Thompson seedless grapes and put them in the fruit bin in the refrigerator. Since they were a little bit expensive, we would very carefully ration them.

But grapes have a bit of a half-life (though not quite as severe as avocados, which seemingly are able to morph from solid to liquid as fast as ice cubes), and after an undetermined number of days, one would blindly place their hand inside the cello bag for a frosty treat – only to be greeted by a slimy cacophony of decomposition.

So even though we didn’t want to be gluttons, we had to carpe diem and gather our rosebuds and make hay and whatnot before the grapes’ nutritious, delicious promise could no longer be kept.

This spawned the family metaphor: “Don’t save your grapes.”, meaning don’t hide away that which is important to you for too long or you might miss the moment that it intersects with opportunity.

This week my daughter discovered about 40 pages of old ideas written in the “notes” app on her computer. She reviewed them, saving only the few that she thought she could write about later.

“It’s so weird to see all this stuff I wrote when I was young!” she told me.

I am not generally known for understatement - I mean, I can do it – but it’s usually not all that impressive. But here, in response, I subtly smiled and slowly nodded in agreement as I said, “Yeah. I know exactly what that’s like.”

That, was an understatement. My own “notes” app has roughly 800 pages in it, and I just thinned them out THREE MONTHS AGO. In comparison to me, my daughter is a precise and focused laser, while I am a rotating disco ball, flinging ideas hither and yon with no clear path at all.

And these ideas are now my Thompson grapes - a once fresh collection, gone to mushy seed.

Of course emails would have been the best place to start a springtime computer clean-up, but I do that every year, and I don’t actually care about the emails.

But every one of these notes evokes a place and time and artistic intention that I actually (embarrassingly) thought was important enough to jot down at some point.

The reason I mention this is that they go back 15 years.

It was a different world, 15 years ago. A younger world, one that skipped through a lush field in short pants, holding aloft a pinwheel in one hand and one of those lollipops that looks like a spiral in the other. A world that could never imagine the world we currently live in, much like Maria Von Trapp from The Sound of Music cannot fathom the roar of Godzilla.

My old ideas were from that world, that time. Jaunty tales of stalwart heroes and female presidents. I would extrapolate, but to be honest the majority of what I wrote then as wild fiction seems naive enough for my daughter to have written at nine years old.

You know, back when she was young.

Thus my notes app has become a cello bag of grapes past their prime: tales that missed their time, where most of the denouements depended on people in power felled by their keen senses of shame, embarrassment, or empathy.

Aw. That’s precious. Now, I suppose I could complete them as science fiction.

I am more careful with ideas now. I try to collect them less and use them more, grateful for the opportunity to create, to imagine. I am metaphorically eating my metaphorical grapes.

But haven’t deleted the old notes yet. They’re little pencil sketches of myself as an enthusiastic quadragenarian ingenue, gleefully typing into my iPhone 4 with a sense of adventure, a lush head of hair, and a bloodstream entirely free of COVID antibodies.

Look at that little fella. No idea Godzilla is coming.

Precious.

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