Next month I’ll be leaving Katonah for a Boston suburb, moving from a house to a condo. Besides a lot of books, I’m bringing personal papers: journals, clips from my journalism days, letters, research files. I’m obsessed with what I call self-chronicling.
This enthusiasm began with a little
booklet with envelopes for grades 1-12, called “School Days: Records and
Memories.” My mother bought this when I started at William Jennings Bryan
Elementary School in Mission, Texas.
The first grade envelope shows
a photo of me looking rumpled and dazed with a bump on my head. I must have
walked into a tree. The envelope includes my report card, a Red Cross card
certifying me as a beginner in swimming, two stapled pages with an explanation
of my score on the Metropolitan Achievement Test, and a photo of my teacher and
me taken on my birthday.
As the years rolled by, the envelopes thickened with achievement tests, honor roll listings, photos, event programs. Envelopes started tearing out of the booklet, so from the 7th grade on I stuffed the ephemera into manilla envelopes.
Why did I save so much, and
still keep it? The older I got the more I depended on academic achievement as a
keystone of my identity. The honor rolls and certificates validated me since,
otherwise, as I felt like an outsider. My self-image was fragile; I wrote my
height and weight on the 5th grade envelope: 60 inches tall, weight
110-115, with the note “Gosh I’m heavy (I don’t look it).” Have I ever not felt
that way? Still, journaling captured my emerging sense of living in history.
A turning point came in the 6th
grade, spring of 1970. Students wrote an autobiography. I did so by putting
pages in a green binder with metal tabs to hold the pages together. That fall I
moved to junior high. I had wanted to start a journal and now I saw how. I
added page to the autobiography and wrote my first entry on September 15, 1970.
In parallel to ongoing journal, I saved whatever struck my fancy over the decades: report cards,
notes stuck into my locker, a ticket stub from a Dallas Cowboys game, every
issue of the newspapers and magazines where I had an article, every letter from my mother
and other relatives, with carbon copies of letters I typed to them. Newspapers
from presidential elections and events like 9/11. A folder of bad job reviews, now
those make for fun reading. Morning-after
notes from stormy 1980s romances.
I lugged this pile around from
Texas to Brooklyn to Connecticut to Katonah. Fearing I would soon be
auditioning for “Hoarders,” I began shrinking the stack a year ago knowing we’d
eventually move. I donated hometown newspapers to the local historical museum,
sold or gave away 80 percent of my record collection, sold posters from the
Soviet Union. I even donated coffee mugs celebrating George Bush’s 2001
inauguration, gifts from a Texas friend.
Anyway, the accumulation mostly stopped in the 1990s. No more vinyl albums, no more journalism clips, digital photos replaced prints. I stopped buying newspapers covering historic events; email made letters obsolete. My book interests are so specific (Judaism and the Soviet Union) that I rarely buy anything. The people to whom I wrote letters died.
I’m still thinking of “why.” The
chronicling since the 1960s constantly informs my creative output. while I jettison the bulkiest materials (all those back issues of Advertising Age, Video Store and the Princeton Alumni Weekly!), I will always keep the most personal collections. Letters to
and Mom and relatives were a weekly report of our lives. And I think about
future generations. I didn’t know much about my parents or grandparents, but I’m
creating a way for people of the 22nd century to know something of
my life and times. The unending chronicles show how I see history as it
happened. I’ve
already planned to donate trunks and binders bursting with millions of words to
Princeton and let the librarians decide what it means.
Best of all, I don’t have to
remember anything since I recorded the big moments and saved letters and
emails. I’ll never run short of material.
