I’m back after a welcome week off while some of our family was in town for the Passover holiday which doesn’t end till Thursday evening, but their departure has returned us to our regular routines. They include writing my weekly blog, so here I go.
My last entry dealt with the accumulation of possessions which proliferate in challenging ways over the course of a lifetime. With the assistance of the book The Material World, we looked at the huge discrepancies across cultures in what people see as “the necessities.” But there’s another chapter that needs addressing. In addition to all those physical possessions some of us bear the additional burden of having lived a life of paper.
This blessing and curse is with us at least from the beginning of our marriage:
“The first wedding anniversary is traditionally connected to gifts of paper. This theme symbolizes a blank slate and the beginning of a new chapter in a couple’s story.”
That’s the blessing. The curse is that, like cancer cells, paper seems to metastasize. Writers and academics are especially prone to this affliction – books, magazines, correspondence, drafts, course outlines – all of which are sustaining and nourishing in small doses, but malignant as they grow.
Several weeks ago, I awoke from a troubling dream that stayed with me in a way that my dreams seldom do: I was being buried under a mountain of paper which was threatening to suffocate me. Not much need for interpretation or analysis of symbols. A few days earlier, I had commented to Rosellen that I sometimes found it hard to breathe amidst all our “stuff.” My dream and waking worlds were in lock step.
So, what is to be done about the problem in these late chapters of our lives? I’ve commented in earlier blogs about my fear that we will leave the task of dealing with this proliferation of paper to our daughters, who will then have legitimate grounds for hating us forever. I know that we have to begin taking seriously the enormous task that should be ours to engage, but Rosellen and I are too busy living our current lives to tackle the artifacts of our past.
There’s one exception. For the last few years, I have watched Rosellen struggling to compile material for an archive of material from Chicago writers that is housed in the Newberry Library. This means going through a considerable number of cartons and file drawers stashed in our apartment, plus even more cartons which have been gathering dust in a storage locker which we rent for a not-negligible annual sum to keep it from cluttering our home and our psyches.
So far, Rosellen’s efforts have had zero impact on our paper glut. She’s reluctant to push the button on the archive arrangement because she feels it is her duty to spare the archivists the trouble of going through too much stuff that might not be worth including, so day after day, she sits surrounded by boxes of correspondence and other miscellaneous printed matter, reading every page of the contents. It’s very entertaining to revisit her early triumphs, not to mention a welcome boost to her aging ego, but it’s not moving the needle.
I’ll confess that watching Rosellen at this task does arouse a bit of jealousy. There are few archives dedicated to preserving the work of teachers and other educators. As a result, I recently discovered a box of materials dating to my first years in Chicago, 30 years back. A colleague and I were hired by the Center for School Improvement at the University of Chicago to train literacy coordinators for each of the 8 schools in our network. Reading over the contents of the box, I was stunned by the quality of the work we produced over two years of workshops – approaches to reading and writing instruction that the literacy coordinators could share with the teachers in their buildings. I have file drawers full of 50+ years of work as a classroom teacher, school director and teacher educator, but if I don’t discard them now, someone else with zero sentimental attachment to them will do the job. Meanwhile, the box I unearthed is still sitting by my desk and will continue there until my fog of sentimentality lifts.
The computer age was supposed to mark the end of the paper glut and perhaps it will for the generations that follow, but it hasn’t done a thing for me and Rosellen. It has succeeded in clearing the drawers and shelves of doctors’ offices as the records that track patients’ medical histories have become electronic. Banks and finance industries have also been transformed, but these transformations have come too late for me. So, I’m left to go to war, armed just with a shredder and an easily accessible dumpster. Maybe a box of matches would be more efficient.
