One of the things I found when I was cleaning out our office closet was an old book of check duplicates from early college. It was mostly normal stuff: phone bill and credit card payments, a few class fees, one for Girl Scout cookies, and a couple to a friend of mine, presumably to cover gambling debts. (He kept those checks pinned to his bulletin board for years. I'm relatively certain he never actually cashed them.)

The one that caught my eye was a check for $310.48 to Jim's Music, a music store that used to be located in Irvine, not far from Juliette's freshman-year dorm. It's dated January 18, 1998, which initially threw me for a loop because Juliette didn't start at UCI until the fall of that year. Looking at the adjacent checks, I can see that I must have written the wrong year, which I tend to do for the first few months of each year.

That check was written for my first electric guitar, a Danelectro 56-U2. I went into the store looking for a cheap guitar, in large part because one of my roommates had a guitar and I both envied him and wanted to jam. (The fact that I couldn't really play didn't stop me. I still can't.) The salesman showed me this wine red, plastic-bodied guitar, telling me about the history of the company and their signature "lipstick" pick-ups. I ended up walking out with the guitar, a silver strap, a cable, and a "Tube Screamer" effects pedal.

It's funny, I remember that guitar being pretty cheap, but $300 when I was a sophomore in college would have been a significant chunk of my savings—about 10% of what I earned the previous summer. Still, from what I can tell, it may have actually gained value—the site I linked above has them listed at $395. I don't imagine I'll ever actually sell it, though, despite the fact that, as you can see, it spends more time collecting dust than getting played these days.