Stuff from the dresser drawer

I dumped the contents of my top dresser drawer - where I have accumulated decades worth of odds and ends - into a box when we were packing for our move from Indiana to Arkansas last fall.
I opened the box over the weekend to see if there was anything there that I might find useful. Not much, really, but a lot of interesting things and memory triggers poured out.
Like this photo.
This is me with my first serious BMW motorcycle - a 1981 R100RS - in the summer of 1986. It was shot in the back yard of our home at 5009 N. College Avenue in Indianapolis. I think my son Steve shot it.
I'm wearing a gray Brown Riding Suit that I bought for the July ride to the BMW MOA national rally at Laguna Seca Racecourse near Monterey, Calif. By today's armored textiles standards, it was pretty flimsy and I'm damned lucky I didn't need it for crash protection. But it was reasonably comfortable through a wide temperature range.
I was the second owner of the graphite gray R100RS and it had about 17,000 miles on the odometer when I bought it from Cycle Werks in the late summer of 1985. It had more than 80,000 miles on the odometer when I sold it in late 1991.
The stockade fence in the background is long gone. Steve and I tore it town with the considerable help of Steve's friend Abe Benrubi. You may know him as Ben Tomasson on ABC-TV's "Men in Trees." He was also a regular cast member in the early years of "ER" and has been in a bunch of movies and commercials.
Here's a photo of Abe from later in 1986 when he played Charlemagne to Steve's Pippin in the Broad Ripple High School production of the musical "Pippin."
Broad Ripple, you may recall, is also the alma mater of David Letterman and Jane Pauley.
I also came across this photo booth picture of Dr. Paul Mark Wadleigh, a professor of communication at Washington State University in Pullman, Wash.
Mark is a longtime friend from our days in the Transcendental Meditation program. He helped me negotiate some tricky emotional territory during my divorce in the early 1990s.
This photo is dated Jan. 1, 1980 and was shot in a drugstore in Seattle.
Now that he has his Ph.D., Mark is much more serious.
I also found my old I.D. badge from the mid-1980s at The Indianapolis News.
When I started my career at The News in February, 1967, nobody needed an I.D. badge and people could walk into the newsroom without any real interference from the security guards. To my knowledge, there was never a single incident of a visitor attacking anyone or causing trouble.
Nevertheless, somebody sold the company on the idea that we were in grave peril and needed to be shielded from our readers and the people about whom we wrote. The last time I was in what used to be known as the Star-News Building, I had to be escorted up to the second floor newsroom by a security guard.
We all thought it was somewhere between silly and paranoid to impose such security measures at the time. I still do.