01-Apr-2008
It’s not an embarrassing confession, certainly. It’s not one of those things where I need my wife standing by my side looking bravely on while I admit I did “it” – hoping, of course, that I can now forge a better life through redemption and service to my fellow human.
So I’ll confess it: I’m a record-keeper. I keep track of everything (although, unlike my father, I don’t record how many times a bar of soap has been used). Some of this is due to necessity. Although my writing life has been only modestly rewarded, I am still considered a small business and must, thus, keep track of all income and all expenditures.
In my basement are boxes filled with receipts, check records, and tax forms. Since my wife, a realtor, is also considered a small business, I log in and store all of her records as well. We have, thus, driving records, advertising records, income records; really, receipts for just about anything that could be called a necessity for either a writer or a realtor. Not long ago I bought a shredder and it nearly broke my heart as I began shredding the first batch of electric bills from the late eighties.
It goes beyond that, however. Since I have been writing for a very long time I have stacks and stacks of manuscripts; folders filled with thousands of pages of notes; hundreds of drafts of stories and essays and books, some of which have been published, some not.
Records must be kept lest all that writerly detritus turn into a literary landfill. I have various filing devices, most of them now computerized, wherein I track the status of all my writings: finished, unfinished, circulating, uncirculated, published, unpublished, journals submitted-to and what submitted, correspondence with fans, editors, agents, blogs and website columns published – it’s a long list.
As I said, some of this is necessary whether for tax purposes or simple professionalism. There’s nothing worse than sending a piece to a journal a second time after it has already been rejected the first time, simply because you forgot you’d already sent it there.
But it all goes a bit deeper than that and becomes quite personal.
My parents worked very hard at their own lives. They had a few successes, a few failures, and lots of hardship. While I like to think they brought two kids into the world who turned out all right, their lives were, like those of the vast majority of humankind, a bit undistinguished. Nevertheless, the things they encountered, the struggles they endured, the thoughts they had about the world in which they lived, were interesting.
Similarly, my paternal grandparents, at what must have been a very young age, put themselves on a ship one day and sailed to America knowing they would never see their native Finland again. Going on what was probably little more than word of mouth, they migrated to northern Minnesota and from there down to northern Illinois. Once in Illinois, my grandfather, a carpenter, built two houses – one to live in and one to rent out – and he and my grandmother raised three children. Both worked hard at their English with my grandmother ending up far more proficient than my grandfather.
On the maternal side, my grandfather was a hugely successful dentist in Chicago, a world traveler and a collector of antiques and art objects. When he died, however, his wife (not my grandmother), had to sell the collection because there was no life insurance and she had no money to live on. Prior to that, however, after my grandmother died of food poisoning in the late twenties or early thirties, my grandfather put his son and daughter (my mother) into church-run orphanages because he ….
Well, that’s my point. While I can, of course, envision all of those folks with a rapidly diminishing degree of clarity, the physical side of all of that for all of them – objects, artifacts, letters, photos, diaries, journals – the material touchstones of memory, fit in one very small box; virtually nothing else remains beyond grave markers and, even there, I know the locations for those of only my parents.
So it’s really not, I like to think, sheer ego that leads me to catalog, categorize, and store small mountains of things that have tumbled from my life over the years. Rather, it has to do with something of a practical fantasy.
I imagine, that is, some distant grandchild a hundred years from now coming upon, in one of life’s mysterious ways, a big box filled with yellowing papers (to date there are about twenty such boxes). He begins reading and finds the box filled with stories, strange stories, weird, quirky, kooky stories, and he asks his mother who wrote all this stuff and his mother says, “Oh, that was your great, great, great (or so) grandfather.”
The child is mesmerized, transfixed by this wild journey into the very heart and soul of someone tied directly to him, but who lived so long ago, someone who kept diaries and wrote poems and plays and novels and stories, who created all these images of what it was like to be alive in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
No, those papers were never “discovered” by some scholar researching little-known writers from long ago. No posthumous fame or posthumous publication or posthumous riches sent that now-distant family to dredge up an old will to see how such events ought to be handled.
But that child now has a link. His or her ancestors are no longer only a series of names on a genealogical chart because there, right there are the thoughts and feelings, the fantasies and imaginings, the hopes and dreams and frustrations of someone who was once truly real and who “belongs” to that child. No longer, for this child, is history solely a bookish narrative. He or she has access to a singular view of a time and a place long gone.
I like to think the excitement of that discovery would be immeasurable in its wonder.
G. K. Wuori © 2008
Photoillustration by the author
