I have long joked that I live my life as though I will eventually be worthy of an archivist. This has, at times, clearly been more than a joke. And is, arguably, a fancy way of saying that I’m a hoarder. There are, I suspect, several archetypes of the hoarder: the collector, who wants to possess all of a kind of a thing (baseball cards, beanie babies, Pokemon plates) is distinct from the value-adder, who presumes all such things will have future value someday (a holdover from too many stories about near-priceless Mickey Mantle baseball cards thwacking in the spokes of dad’s bicycle). There is the Depression-era future-user (pronounced with a soft s, as in the phrase “of use”) who knows that someday money will be tight and that ball of string and batch of half-used lightbulbs will make the difference between starvation and survival. And me? I’m a historian, standing at the overwhelming intersection of would-be writer and history buff, staring up at the mountains of paper as though they hold the key to understanding it all.
It’s a particularly poignant time to be confronting my collected history (or, I hasten to add, a part of it – tens of better organized tubs of my first twenty years remain in Albuquerque awaiting later sorting and perusal), with the (goal) deadline later today to be out of the storage space we got a couple years ago as a compromise with Alex to make our small two-bedroom more living space and less museum. I am, of course, bound for West Virginia in the fall to study Creative Writing of the Creative Non-Fiction variety, the launching point for memoirs and recountings to come on the heels of the Uber book whose choicest parts got me into the program. And while Plan A is not to write my own story, or any portion thereof, as the opening book/thesis, there is at least the understanding of what could come in the future should my actual Plan A book work out as planned. (Not to be terribly cryptic, but you understand my general proclivity to stay secretive about books in the planning stage. That said, I was pretty open about the Uber plan and non-fiction does lend itself to more advanced openness since the story is one that exists and is being told rather than created from whole cloth and thus vastly more fragile in its infancy.) As I contemplate the idea I’m pondering for the book, discuss it with my father on the phone, we both periodically lament the scraps of paper discarded that would aid my research further, the gaps I will have to fill in on my own (although, that’s the room for the creative part, perhaps). What item do I hold in my left hand at that moment that, by moving to the trash box instead of the keep box, I’m depriving some future archivist, even if it’s just me, that could tie it all together, explain the whole thing?
Given my level of previous clinginess (clingyness?) to paper, this concern is hardly realistic. Still kept are ticket stubs, notes about my day, cartoon drafts, fragments of fiction ideas ranging from the absurd to those incorporated into prior works, full editing drafts of those prior works, cards and notes between people, newspapers and publications acknowledging my existence, debate flows (I know only some of these are truly sentimental, but it’s hard to sort through which in such a frenzy), particular to-do lists that seem to capture a mindset. It’s worth noting that this is all somewhat duplicative of a life that, since 2000, has been fairly meticulously documented online, in this space, with the periodic exceptions of certain particularly busy or lamentable times. I come by this tendency honestly, with my father wrestling his own penchant for documentation inherited from his parents prior (is heredity destiny? – more on this in a future post, probably). But I perhaps have my own unique spin. While my father has a tendency to look at painful chapters and chuck them out wholesale after the moment has passed, it is my most challenging moments on which I tend to dwell, not only keeping disproportionately more but lingering on these pages, like a time machine, when I should be making quick decisions to keep or pitch, keep or pitch.
It is, of course, the quest for clues, mostly. The lasting consequence of periodic betrayal is paranoia and the lingering belief/fear (often inculcated by the betrayer themselves!) that this should not be a surprise, that the clues were all there, that you failed to solve the puzzle by the time the buzzer went off. And of course there’s the implication that in so doing, you could have prevented the hurt (or some of it) or even the event itself (or some of it) and that it was all right there in front of you. This ongoing binary debate, should I have known or not?, is fueled by evidence on both sides. And of course, the counter-argument is what I most want to find, justification for my naivete, bolster for my faith, proof that I was not deluding myself but that the other person just changed, boom, and anyone in my place would have been blindsided. Here, read this note, I say to no one, could someone capable of this have written that?
Of course, many of the files and boxes I’ve really confronted this week have remained sealed since 2010. Chapters too painful to examine, so the box was taped up tight, bunged in the corner, timebombs waiting for today. And the funny thing about that, the truly funny thing, is the items that remain unemotional, irrelevant, and have nothing to do with the struggle to overcome one’s past and allocate proper proportions of blame. They were kept because they mattered at the time or could matter and now are easy discards, the one moment of quick and easy relief in the effort to sift through boxes and ideally discard at least half of them.
Chief among these are insurance policies. These are the most satisfying throwaways because they are uniformly massive, ranging from stapled twenty-pagers to the glossy oversized hundred-page booklets with complete lists of providers or exceptions to their coverage. Car insurance, renters insurance, health insurance: these extensive explanation’s of America’s biggest scam detail just what you will or won’t get when disaster strikes. Every word of these seems so potentially vital when the policy is active and so obviously irrelevant the day it expires. One holds onto these desperately, ready to flip through it frantically in the wake of accident or diagnosis, ready to highlight passages and fling them back in the face of the insurer to hold them accountable. You said you would cover this! You said you would do this for me! How dare you try to renege now that I actually need this?
There are the receipts, mostly kept in a flurried wave of terror about identity theft or just plain old theft: the notion that receipts with even fragments of credit cards would be reassembled and used to drain one’s bank account, a fear that made more sense when (a) there was more to lose and (b) privacy still seemed extant. Most of these have faded to semi-legibility anyway as though that special slick receipt paper were particularly designed to disappear after a few short years, as though the receipts knew the knowledge they kept was due to expire with time. I smile at a Chipotle logo or an unused coupon, but mostly marvel at how I could have imagined that it made sense to put these things in the boxes in the first place. Then again, they say that the bulk of records dug up from pre-paper civilizations appear to be accounting documents: records of commerce, IOUs, deeds, paystubs.
The paystubs also gleefully join the trash pile, save for an occasional sample of one from each job just to be able to show some future child what this or that amount of time was deemed to be worth in the age before the dinosaurs. Ditto the car service receipts, a special kind of receipt, larger and more ornate, falling somewhere between the scrappy micro-receipts of a bank deposit and the burgeoning insurance policies for the vehicle itself, tracking the slow steady progress into decay and disrepair of our giant metal horses. Once the car is gone, the value of these drops from near-zero to full zero, the record of the care taken of a car having no future bearing on one’s life. It is hard to imagine anyone caring how many times grandpa got taken in by the offer of a fresh new air filter.
Most varied in shape and size are the manuals, most for items long discarded. A couple are for video games long beloved and these are at least slightly sentimental and were actually necessary at first (video games being less intuitive to use than, say, a vacuum cleaner, microwave, or alarm clock). There is a striking moment of contrast and mortality to be felt when observing a manual for a shiny new item just hours after deciding to get rid of the same item, now broken, useless, or out-of-date. The most intriguing through-line here is when I move the light blue landline phone into the donate pile, wondering if this will even be worth the trip to Goodwill, later run across the manual for it, and still later discuss with my mother what life is like without a landline as she discusses disconnecting theirs. At least the butter churn and the oxcart could be burned for warmth! What is the fate of my once oft-caressed phone? Failing to rot in the ground as it lies for a century beside decaying receipts and someone’s half-eaten cheeseburger? Steadily drifting to the bottom of the ocean where it will pin a helpless baby turtle to the seafloor? In keeping all this stuff, it occurs to me, there is at least some ridiculous optimism about future use or avoiding the landfill. But, contrastingly, if I’d let it go years earlier, it might have done some good for someone in the last decade before its inevitable slide into useless existence.
Finally, there are directions. Pages and pages and pages of MapQuest or GoogleMap directions, to debate tournaments, to a friend’s house, to a job interview. Like the landline phone, these are relics of an era before cellular ubiquity, an era that’s been shorter in my instance than most due to my long-standing resistance to joining this particular herd. I keep only the longest set of directions, the hastily printed driving instructions from Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris to a castle in Berbiguières from which David Gray heroically navigated a comically small overstuffed rental car through the French countryside at night, through wrong turns on unsigned lanes, redirecting us to the right route without the aid of the helpful default voice of a GPS. This triumph remains among the most improbably miraculous of my life. Unlike so many kept items, seeing this folded set of foreign sheets instantly fills me with wondrous joy.
Papers, I release you. Not all of you, mind – there are possibly books still to be written or dark nights of the soul to be confronted, unanswerable questions to be tackled about a past that feels eternal. But herein lies your immortality, your fifteen minutes, your existence even after you’ve choked a seagull to death high above some rotting patch of neo-land. It may soothe you to know that, despite your long-gone usefulness, I still hesitated with each box of you on the precipice of the dumpster, a virulent instinct of history that I’m trying to quell shouting out in your defense. Be gone, be free, be unburdened of the trip on country roads to come.
The rest of you, of course, you’re coming with me. In the end, you’re all still insurance policies. You’re my evidence that I lived a life, guarding against Alzheimer’s and self-doubt in equal measure. A bulwark against solipsism, a paper wall to defend me from the accusation that I made it all up, exaggerated it all, only imagined that people felt as they said and did what they did. Words are cheap when spoken, left on the wind, but a written document is binding in court. Hearsay vs. evidence. Gossip and rumors vs. black and white. I will probably never hold up these papers, copied and carefully highlighted, as raging demand for a redress of grievances. And I’ve lived in New Orleans long enough to know that even when the papers say you have to get paid, the insurance companies will do all they can to squirrel out of their commitments anyway. The policies, it could be argued, exist more to absolve than to constrain. I can no more bend history to my will than hold the country accountable for the crimes of Katrina. But at least I can remember it and try to make sure there’s someone who remains that doesn’t forget.
