Just for a Moment

16 January 2020

Just for a Moment

Thought I was going to focus today on how things that I used to have to try and work into my schedule are now more what you might call events of the day.  Had to meet with the TIAA financial gent this morning.  When I was working I would have to move a couple of cases to the lunch hour to get some contiguous free time in the morning to sit down and look at pie charts and rates of return. (Right now I am feeling comfortable with the plan for moving forward economically.  Good talk, good numbers.). Today I just had to remember to show up on time and at the place where the meeting was  scheduled.  It was an event, not a burden.

But suddenly my plan to talk about this shift in the meaning of meetings and events pre and post retirement got shifted.  A moment occurred that transported me almost viscerally in time. 

After meeting with the finance guy I returned home to the task I have been working on this week, purging the unnecessary.  Today have been purging old papers.  Mostly I have been separating envelopes into a standard recycling pile and documents with any kind of linkage to an account or an ID into another.  These confidential documents will be going to a Rapid Shred kind of place.  By the time this is done there will be several feet of documents to be shredded.  I am not doing that with my little 10 page at a time shredder.

My wife has been bugging me for years to get rid of some really old papers.  I note that when my mother died I ended up with a number of her and my father’s papers.  This stuff has been sitting in basement storage since my mother’s estate was concluded such a long time ago.  One packet was a bunch of old tax returns from 1982.

Opening the blue plastic folder (the rage back in the day of bank giveaways) the files were in I was hit with the smells of my youth.  It was a combination of my mother’s powder and my father’s hair oil.  Clearly, they both must have handled and reviewed the documents. My guess is that some of the scent they carried upon their persons every day of my youth was captured when they touched those papers. The slightest of transference having occurred after they had run a hand through their hair or something to that effect and flipped a page.

Someone looking in from the street would have thought I was crazy.  There I stood in the kitchen of my house by a table in the bay window.  I had a packet of old 1040 forms and attachments.  Holding them up to my nose I must have looked like I was in a trance.  In reality  I was in a house on Mill Street in Pedricktown a year before 1983.  I was in a car taking the ride down by Head of the River Church on the way to the shore.  I was in the living room of our home with Mom asleep in her chair and Dad in his chaired dozing off with the newspaper in his hands with Jim Gardner blabbering on the evening news on Channel Six..

For a solid minute I stood their holding those papers knowing the scent would not last long.  I felt a little like the main character in Spielberg’s A.I., who gets to spend just one day with his mother after a true millennia of separation.  The papers need to go and I can never return to that time.  But for a minute my whole body was lost in an era that will never come again.  I am thankful for that unexpected minute.