Archival

I learned somewhat early in my career, but have also always had an innate predisposition for, archiving everything. The good news is, at some point I also learned the value of purging archives now and then, but there are things I keep forever. My journals date to 1981 or so, and there is a cache of pay statements from my dad’s career which goes to his hiring at the university where I spent some good times growing up. Those make for fascinating financial forensics or history – and, indeed, though it’s incomplete and incoherent, I’ve got similar documentation from my own hundred and fifty or so jobs past and present.

At some point within the past several months, I even came across the wooden pencil box my dad made for me when I was a kid. He built it on the same specs as the paperboard ones all my friends had – long enough for pencils and a ruler, and later on for compass and protractor. He made it when I was young enough that the inside of it is entirely coated in crayon markings, the test palette for coloring I did before I went off to grade school. Inside this box, still redolent of ancient crayon wax, is the folded archive of notebook papers of notes sent between my friends and I in high school, for which I promised to be the official recordkeeper.

One can hardly say I fell short in my duties. Some of the notes are still folded into the triangular “footballs” we used to play with, or the little rectangles with pull tabs with which it was once de regeur to fold notes in class. I haven’t looked at these in thirty years, but I did put the box away. Somewhere safe. One shudders to think what may be made of my various gripes and crushes, as shared at age fourteen, once I am dead and some poor sot gets the job of fire-bombing disposing of my possessions. By then, I expect it will be a stranger or two clearing my house for sale; this isn’t so much sad to me as it is queer (in the sense we once used, before that word took such a trip through disparagement-land and back and probably back again.

I do contemplate from time to time what to do with the journals (also neglected now for a couple decades at least). The boys I liked in 1985 or dreams of kisses never shared are perhaps best not left to my nieces in the estate, and even I don’t actually care anymore. Perhaps best to give those a read (“some time” as we are so heedlessly prone to promise ourselves) and consign them to a bin, if not to a flaming farewell, and save posterity the trouble of pondering how pretty that one curly-headed boy’s eyes were, or what so-and-so did that embarrassed me in Chemistry. I spent many years losing touch with some of the folks populating those old pages; it seems fit I should lose touch with the memories; purge the archives and make room (or just let lie fallow) what space they occupied.



At work today, I picked up one of those “I’ll manage this to-do pile some time” stacks, and had an easy few minutes sorting and actually dealing with most of it. The rest wasn’t difficult, merely lightly tedious, and there’ll be a bit more in case I get bored tomorrow. Heh.

This is also the time of year when it’s wise to deal with personal archives – bills and so on, and particularly tax items. Lacking an office (and motivation), I had gone YEARS without filing, but having the giant desk and new, more capacious file cabinet, I took a nice fat bite out of that issue a couple months ago. More awaits (it always does, doesn’t it?), but the beast is not so terrible, and time to file is – well, upon us. And there’s a literal pay day of sorts in it for me, when I deal with that. Refund season is nice; though my dad taught us not to lend much to Uncle Sam interest free, I still seem to do it, and still carelessly let it feel like “extra” money when the funds are deposited.

‘Tis the season for spring cleaning, and shoving the couch around isn’t enough. (I have my eyes on taking a day or two off to deal with the BASEMENT. Though my mom keeps sighing that she needs to think of something to do with my grandmother’s bedroom furniture, which is down there, that small set of items is the least of my subterranean organizational concerns, and I’m happy for it to live there for the forseeable time being. Or something.)


All this, of course, will make it EASIER TO DO MY RESEARCH (which, let’s not pretend, I have done in the past on a postage-stamp desk, if I bothered with my desk at all). It’s all very writer-excusey, of course – “I’ll start my diet Monday” – but what piddling I’ve done of late on the WIP has largely been theoretical scene-smithing, not applied science. And I actually love research.

Fortunately, one good deed breeds another (or something like that), and the glow of accomplishment seems to beget more accomplishments. The office being organized and more or less lacking in lurking To-Do’s and unmanaged pieces of paper *does* make using that glorious desk for the old unpaid job all the easier. And spring is beginning to sprung in my brain (or something …).

Stay tuned. Some day, I may even come up with a title and be able to discuss something other than “The WIP.” You just stay tuned; it’s going to get right down exciting around here.