The paper of yesterdays and tomorrows

I’ve spent three days going through paper.  I’ve opened all the files in all the cabinets in the house.  I’ve opened every box and taken out every keepsake.  I’ve pored over old journals and letters.  I’ve looked in amazement at the tiny footprints of my children, inked when they were just a few moments old.  I found a receipt for a ticket for my first-ever train ride through Europe, stapled to a description I wrote as I looked out the window.  I came upon a stack of newpapers I’ve kept through the years and broke down and cried for all our country has been through, all our world has been through. I found birth certificates, death announcements and paper documenting everything in between.

I found stories I wrote when I was ten years old and put them aside to show Zach who has started writing his own stories now.  I found pictures I drew when I was five years old.  Those I put aside to show Sophie, who sits at the little table in our playroom and draws and draws and draws, for hours on end.  I found the aged sheets of music from my very first piano recital when I played (proudly, so proudly) a very fine tune called The Pesky Fly, and I put that aside for Eli so he could learn to play it, too, in that little way he has, sitting on the bench with both hands on the keys and his eyes scrunched up, reading the music.  I found sheets of typing that I did when I was just a little girl at my Grandpa’s office, keeping busy while he finished up, full of nonsense words and my name, typed over and over again as I sat in his office chair with my feet swinging, in love with the sound of the typewriter smacking the letters onto the paper.

I would open a box and lose myself in it.  I read it all, every word on every piece of paper, some of it practically coming apart in my hands.  I laughed some and I learned some and I shook my head in frustration some.  And I cried some, of course, surrounded by my history and pieces of the people and places that are lost to me now.

And what will my children go through, when they are in their 40th year and they find themselves with days to themselves?  I have some hope that it is all of these same things, with lots of themselves added in.  They’ll find the handprint turkey they made in Kindergarten and the programs from their 1st grade Christmas pageants and their birth announcements and the invitations to all their birthday parties.  They’ll find their report cards and letters to Santa and notes to the tooth fairy asking could she please leave the tooth so we could show it to Grandma.  And all of it, paper.

Paper.

I’ve long had  a love affair with paper.  Paper for drawing, paper for writing, paper for wrapping.  Paper that is made into books for reading.  Newspaper, of course,  for . . . so many things.  For giving news.  For binding together a city or state or nation by sharing the stories of its citizens.  For comic strips that make us laugh on a Sunday morning in daddy’s lap.  For putting pictures on Silly Putty.  For house-training impossibly cute new puppies.  For spreading on the table before painting a wooden birdhouse for Grandma.  For wrapping fragile things before they are packed away.

Paper is how we share ourselves.  We send cards to celebrate important moments and we send invitations to surround ourselves with friends on special days.  We make signs for help in finding lost pets and for selling lemonade by our front curb.  We use scraps to jot down our phone numbers when we run into an old friend at the coffee shop and we use business cards to spread the word of how we’ve chosen to make a living.  We sign legal documents to make choices we’ve made real and official.  We fold a one dollar bill into a little bird to keep a child quiet during dinner at a fancy restaurant.  We pass out sheets of music at church so we can all sing together.  Paper.

I know a lot of it is going away, our use of paper.  I know that I’m typing this on a laptop and will hit the “publish” button and it will get sent out to the world and there won’t ever be even the tiniest bit of paper involved in the process at all.  Except of course all the paper in my life that inspired me in some way to even pick up that very first pencil and write my very first letter or story or poem.  That paper is part of this, what I’ve written today.

Happy New Year to all my dear friends and family.  Thank you to all of you for being a part of my history and also a part of my tomorrow.  For all of us, may 2011 be full of laughter and moments that are real and days that we wish would go on forever.  May we appreciate the joy we find and may we also take the defeats in our lives with grace and strength.  May we always have someone to reach out and take the hand of when we need it and may we always provide that to others who need it, too.  All my love and warmest wishes to all of you.

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