I Can't Even...With the File Folders

Maybe because the wet cough that’s haunted me for three weeks was magically dry this morning or maybe because I’m all hopped up on oral steroids, but suddenly, the hard-copy notes I’ve made for a super-secret blog = a thing that needs to be in my life today.

The notes ain’t in the most likely corner of my home office. Or the second-most likely. And during the chase, I encounter 26 files and hundreds of sheets of paper that have outlived their use. I can’t resist a good house-cleaning—especially when legal chemicals are involved—so I recycle client notes, presentations, scripts and Web-site proofs until a thin stack of miscellaneous paper remains.

Every one of these sheets are charged with meaning.

And I’m compelled to save all of them, but where the fuck do I file:

+ The napkin inked with the birth/death dates of a 29-year-old man I never met but whose mom and sister made a huge impression at one of my readings last winter.

+ Notes about a Skype fling—surely, a snappier phrase for this exists, kids?—which I quite satisfyingly shared with The Fling…but not The Internet. Because despite early indicators, he was just a rogue wave who crashed into my world for Lent. 

+ The eulogy and ancestry records for a Massachusetts woman I never met but who adored my 94-year-old grandmother, whose continued adoration of reading, writing, and traveling is a big part of my origin story. 

+ A card with Alberto’s famous handwriting that wishes me “a Wonderful! Day”; and closes with “Love you with all my heart.”

With all his…heart.

His extraordinary, incomparable, lethal heart.

The note is dateless.

(Naturally.)

These un-file-able piles might be why I should clean out my desk more often.

Could be the reason I’m ambivalent about all correspondence turning digital.

Or maybe they’re proof that despite a grillion folders with titles written in confident, capital Sharpie letters, there are still pieces of life in which mementos do not neatly fit.