I have been organizing fifty years of clutter. I am doing it with the intention of reviewing it for future writing projects. Its a work I’ve planned to attend to for thirty years. It may be one of the rare an unexpected blessings of a massive Earth threatening pandemic.
All that organizing, and running for Congress and studying French for three hours a day have cut into my writing. It has also served to build up some serious steam in my pour little head that always sleeps better though nights that I have emptied it onto the blog.
Not a day goes by that I don’t have earth shaking revelations to share…….and yet I have been keeping them mostly to myself for six months.
All my work helps me put things into perspective. For instance I’ve been wanting to write about my Grandfather for years. I only knew him from a distance as a kid for about a decade most of which I lived five hundred miles away. I saw him only for a couple hours or days every year for most of that time. I have been catching up with him for the last thirty years.
As for my Dad I knew him for about 30 years. He died at age 62 and my first memory of him was his teaching me to count to 100 as I was about to begin first grade. He was 25 when I was born. Subtract the first five years and I knew him for thirty. Until I was married that was every day except for a summer when I interned for our Congressman in Washington D.C.
It was a bit of a shock to me this morning to realize I have known my Father-in-law for considerably longer if not quite so intimately. Claude Scott died a year ago yesterday. I think I first met him the day of my wedding rehearsal when I botched my family introductions at the Congregational Church and put the wrong connections to Claudia’s family as I introduced them to mine. A sign of things to come??????
That was 1974. I’ve known Claude Scott for 45 years……fifteen years longer than my Father. Early in my marriage I decided to call him “Dad” to be friendly even though it took me a decade to get used to it. My Dad’s documentation takes up half the length of a filing cabinet drawer. Claud Scott takes up four or five inches. They are just the tip of the iceberg. After properly filing fifty years worth of dross and gems I have about 15 full length filing cabinet drawers of papers to organize divided into three roughly equal portions about my politics, my school board work and my family’s life. And I have an almost equal load of paperwork on the book I started to research in 2006 about what I think was the biggest political scandal in Minnesota history back in 1978.
30 file cabinet drawers!!!!! That’s why I insisted on turning my attic into a proper office and filing space. I really better live to be 100 if I’m going to get through it all. If I don’t Claudia has made it clear. When I die she’s renting an Industrial dumpster and throwing it all out. I need to summarize it before she gets her hand on my evidence.
NOTE: This and other recent posts were spewed out with no editing because my head needed a quick emptying.
