1) For a long time I have needed to “lighten my footprint” at Maison Robaire — how on earth have I lived here 21 years? — and with the arrival this month of a new shredder, it was time to get started. Long ago I got six plastic tubs to store papers, and last week I brought one up from the basement to get started.
2) In her wonderful memoir Wait for Me!, the Duchess of Devonshire described opening a drawer at Chatsworth and finding: “a miniature of Georgiana Duchess, a Women’s Institute program of 1932, a bracelet given by Pauline Borghese to the Bachelor Duke . . . and a crystal wireless set. It was like finding Christmas presents wherever we went.” I had no such deluxe discoveries!
3) In fact, the very first thing I saw was the memorial service program for my friend Hollis, who died almost 20 years ago — a poignant beginning. Hollis was so young, under 40, and one of the sweetest, kindest, campiest friends I’ve been lucky to have.
3a) I remember that service (in the chapel at ye Instytytte). I had been asked to speak about Hollis’s life outside work, as we’d known each other long before he came to ye Instytytte. Hollis had been a part of the local gay volleyball league, and there had been a dust-up with someone about who was “the one, true Monica Seles of Boston gay volleyball” that made it onto the letters page of Bay Windows. They published my takedown reply, which began “Which team of junior high school girls does [whatever his name was] belong to . . .” to Hollis’s delight. “Advantage, Hollis.” Rest in peace, dear.
4) As I fed the shredder old utility bills and outdated financial documents, it looked like it was roughly a time capsule from 2005-2007, but not entirely. And the large cache of Christmas cards yielded several names I had not heard from in many years: coworkers and volunteers from more than one job, elderly family members, and a couple people who just plain disappeared. I recognized two names of people who had died, and remembered happy times with them.
5) Somehow I didn’t expect all the photos, including from my 40th birthday dinner, vacations of the ’00s, reunion committee dinners, family photos from long before I was born, etc. And artwork, prints and postcards from museum visits as far back as 1980.
6) And did I mention the browning and crumbling copies of In Newsweekly, saved from when I actually got paid by print media for my alter ego’s column?
7) There’s also a slim sheaf of typewritten pagesclipped together with a note in Mother’s handwriting: “Anecdotes written by Mother (Beatrice Anna Houska Thorson) about experiences at the Port of L.C.” (After Grampa Al died in 1955, Gramma went back to work.) The first page includes the sentence “I didn’t dream that in the right hand top drawer of his desk he was still harboring a loaded six shooter with a few notches on the handle.”
8) Having gone through the entire box, I am pleased to say I reduced the contents by two thirds. I’ll take victory where I can get it. But it begs the larger question of what is the record of one’s life, and how is it, and its meaning, preserved? I cannot forget the last morning I spent in my parents’ house after a week of sorting and disposing with my sister, looking at the pile of Mother’s date books going back to 1973. That was a record of our family’s life, and it was so large and overwhelming — and I secretly somehow knew I would never look inside them. I did not want to leave them, but I knew I could not take on that mass. Not least, I realize even more now, because I’ve created a mass of my own.