File It!

When I began teaching seventh graders in the fall 1966 at the old Aurora Middle School, my room was number 116. Except for tables and chairs (for the students), a PA speaker, and some blackboards (they were green!), and a teacher’s desk, my room was empty.

Oh, there was a filing cabinet in the back of the room. It was empty.

When I left teaching in 2011, I had accumulated more than half a dozen file cabinets, all chockablock with files; the basement now features other files in plastic storage boxes.

So what happened?

I’ve filed not just handouts and quizzes and tests but enormous amounts of information about the writers and books I taught and/or wrote about. I’ve got an entire filing cabinet devoted to Jack London, another jammed with information about Edgar Poe, another full of stuff about Shakespeare—including programs for productions of all of his plays (all of which we’ve seen).

Whenever I saw in a newspaper anything related to one of “my” writers, I clipped and stored it in the file(s).

There are also keepsakes in there—programs from speeches “my” writers gave, stamps that picture them, first-day covers of those stamps, etc.

And copies of my own publications. I wrote so many reviews for Kirkus (1563), that I’ve hole-punched them and stored them in notebooks. The same with these blog posts, the same with the doggerel I’ve written over the years.

I continued doing this after I retired—stuffing material into folders and notebooks. I had no real reason to do so, or course. I wasn’t teaching ... who would ever know? Or care? But still I forged on.

Until about a year ago when my balance became so bad—and my madness subsided somewhat—that my sanity emerged somewhat victorious. (I still keep these posts in notebooks.)

So now what?

Who would possibly want all that stuff?

Who would want to sort through it all, separating the good, the bad, the ugly? (The “ugly” pile will be alpine.)

I guess it won’t matter: I’ll be elsewhere by then (let’s not speculate about where). And, anyway, for virtually all of us on this earth there is no “forever.” A thousand years from now (assuming we haven’t destroyed the planet) who among us will be remembered?

But last night I was thinking this: In those files—in those cabinets—among those words I still exist. And live. At least for a while.