I am doing spring cleaning. My children would laugh, knowing how funny it is that the activity actually coincides with the season this time. They know that I call it spring cleaning whether it’s April or December. They also know that this deep cleaning, the one where I do more than dust and vacuum, clean the mirrors, usually happens when someone is coming to visit.
But no one is coming. This is all about me.
Today paper covers every available surface in my living room—tables, windowsills, chairs. Even the floor, where I am carefully picking my way by one mountain (interesting newspaper and magazine clippings) and then another (drafts of various stories) and another (birth certificates, report cards). The categories seem endless.
I am a paper person. I love magazines and books, postcards announcing a new art exhibit. I still have some of the kids’ report cards and papers, drawings. There’s never a complete set of anything. One kid might know that he had all A’s and one B in the third quarter of the fifth grade, and a C in history in the first quarter of the eighth.
Every time I’ve tried to organize my paper life, I’ve failed. I’ve tried boxes. I’ve tried drawers. I’ve tried filing cabinets. I have finally concluded that a functioning system requires me to actually see it, so I am file-foldering my entire paper life and stacking them on shelves, similar to the way doctors organize patient records. Don’t laugh. It’s perfect.
I have broad categories like “correspondence” and “bills,” and narrower ones like “AAA” and “the name essay.” As I find various bits, I have to create a new title.
Like today when I found three of my dad’s papers that I never remember having seen. There was a handwritten job recommendation from the Rt. Rev. “Monseigneur” R. Barry Doyle in Menton, France, dated July 4, 1931. I think this was after my dad left New York in the Depression when his whole life—the one I never knew about until he was dead—collapsed. There’s a card, postmarked New York City 1944, from a friend telling him he would “give Cupid your message. I know she will be glad.” Cupid was not my mom: Mom never lived in New York and they didn’t meet until 1947.
And a sheet of discolored paper (actually they are all discolored) dated Thursday June 21, 1951, in my dad’s precise script: “Our little Ann had her measles or should say is having her measles—started on June 16, 1951, reached peak June 20, 1951—started to feel and act herself on June 21, 1951, 4:30 p.m. Danger is over.” I never knew my dad loved me like that. My dad was not one to say I love you—in words or gestures.
I magic-marker the edge of a new file folder “new things I know about Dad” and place each handwritten note, the black ink still vibrant after all these years, into the folder, and, then, just before I put it on the shelf, I pull out the last note—about me and the measles with my dad’s heart beating all through the words. I place that one in an empty folder and write “new things I know about me.”
Annaliese Jakimides has new work in the journals Consequence and Off the Coast.
