New Foundation – old diploma, a mystery

The work crew had to dig out a portion of the dirt floor — it’s a crawl space under my house — in order to pour the new foundation. 

I was amazed at what they found. 

Old Bottles

A brown bottle with Purex etched on the surface, filled with burnt wooden matches, water and sludge.  I had an image of a teenager sneaking smokes down there, hoping to hide the evidence by dropping it all into the bottle. There were tin cans, partially rusted with crumbling labels, remnants of the home’s staples: Carnation Condensed Milk and Folger’s Coffee. 

Noxema jar

The woman of the house, or perhaps the adolescent daughter, used Noxema face care, packaged in the familiar deep blue glass jar and white lid now turned rust.

Weights and pullies from windows, a few brick cobbles from an unknown Portland street, more bottles and jars now unrecognizeable, encrusted with 40 or 50 years of dirt and most surprizing of all, a High School Diploma.

Encased in musty, semi-moldy black leather turned greyish, the gilt lettering still gleams in an Old English font, Robert Service High School, Anchorage, Alaska. Inside, under a plastic casing is the certification that Michelle Rene Warren has satisfactorily completed the Course of Study prescribed for graduation, and is awarded this Diploma, given in May, 1987.

Diploma

The saved Commencment program, on gold paper has frayed edges, and a similar type face as the front of the diploma.  Inside, the list of the evening events and the graduates. Michelle Rene Warren, one of 441 graduates, wasn’t the Salutatorian or Valedictorian, nor listed as one of the Honor Graduates.  She might have been a cheerleader for the Cougars, or is it a Bobcat sketched on the front? Perhaps she sang in the Swing Choir and perfomed “Brothers and SIsters”, or played the recessional piece, “The Crowning Glory” with the Symphonic Band.

Or maybe none of these activities were hers. Perhaps she was a student who loved literature and language and went on to get her Ph.D  in French language and Medieval Studies at Stanford in 1993. A Michelle R. Warren did, and then taught at University of Miami in Florida, perhaps then went to Dartmouth.  I googled the name and found that info. Of course they are not necessarily the same person, there could be a dozen women with the name Michelle R. Warren.

Robert Service HS Diploma, 1987

She would have been one of the last to receive her diploma that night. Was she thinking of her future as she waited, was she getting ready to move?  How did her diploma get to the basement of a house on Sherrett Street in Sellwood, in Portland, Oregon? Did she live there? Or come to visit an aunt or uncle the summer she graduated, a fun trip before she went to college? 

It’s another mystery.