The Archives

Signs that your day is not going to go as planned: 1. Your train comes screeching into the station 3 minutes early and you don’t recognize the conductor. Translation: this train is over an hour late and is a local, therefore making every precious stop on its way into town. 2. You just confirmed a date during your train ride. Translation: you just doomed yourself to a 30 minute delay. Keep in mind this one didn’t actually happen to me. The guy behind me made this fatal error. I’ve been receiving email alerts all day that my line is chronically late today. Whoever is meeting this guy at Uno’s on route 9 is in for a wait. 3. You just made a date at Uno’s and used the word ‘healthy’. Admittedly he said he hasn’t been there in ten years. I wanted to turn around and describe the last 3 meals I ate there, but I still have a chunk of potato skin lodged in my carotid artery from when we met our wedding DJ there 18 months ago. I like their food, but only in an ‘I remember when I used to do whatever I wanted to do’ kind of way. It’s a totally irresponsible place to go. 4. Your wife has informed you that you have some fun awaiting you in a room that is not normally associated with fun and you have not already planned fun for that day. Translation: This weekend M and I did our filing/ record cleanup.

You see, I come from a family of hoarders. (Un)fortunately, the house where I spent most of my youth is cavernous and signs of hoarding go unnoticed for great stretches of time, cleverly hidden by unused rooms and ornately carved cabinetry. I shouldn’t use the word ‘hoard’, since the stuff is mostly useful and attractive and the house is decidedly not filled with discarded packs of Salem 100s, pizza boxes and filthy kittens. Rather, one side of my family likes to keep mail. Lots of it. I haven’t seen the mail pile in a while but I heard it was mighty. Apparently it did serve a purpose and said pile should be taken care of at some point. I, too once had a mighty mail pile. It lived in a garbage bag hidden in M’s apartment. I would periodically sort my mail into ‘useful’ and ‘trash’. The useful mail was saved and surreptitiously concealed and brought over when I came to visit. Eventually, M found the pile and this glaring red flag was innocently explained away. Next, I purchased a shredder to contain this problem, but I was not allowed to use it while my roommate, a former Arthur Andersen employee, was home. I thought this was some sort of joke at first but he was adamant. So the shredder did it’s thing and now lives in the loft, where mail periodically migrates first from the 1st floor coffee table to the 1syt floor stairs, then to the 2nd floor stairs, then to the loft and finally into the shredder when the pile is large enough to swallow the shredder. Given this description, you can imagine what my ‘important papers’ pile looks like. In this area I am slightly exaggerating. I did at one point get organized enough to produce documentation proving I was worthy of buying a house. Although given the news lately, being approved to buy a house no longer carries the juice it once did. I even had a box for my files and every few months I would sort the pile and put the statements into their appropriate folder. The box lived in the guest room closet with M’s tidy little box. Lately this wasn’t so successful as M and I took turns stuffing the closet with our important papers like it was a Florida ballot box, and eventually M had enough. So this was the fun task that was created for Saturday. Nearly 10 years of financial and miscellaneous records needed to be sorted out. Given the ease of electronic bill paying, it’s possible that I would go months without opening certain statements. I never had to do the monthly sit down at the living room table with the calculator, checkbook and bills thing. I guess I’m spoiled. So now I have periodic paper binges to deal with instead. I had a folder with nothing but cell phone bills. Another with credit card statements on a card I’ve never used. I had 6 inches of old expense reports. There were electric bills, sewer bills, old leases, cable bills, bank statements, performance reviews, car repair receipts for cars I no longer own, insurance coverage sheets for cars I no longer own, 401k statements for closed accounts and 8 inches of completely random papers stuffed into it’s own folder that defied categorization. That was just the papers that had so far been previously opened and sorted. There was another foot of mail that was in a giant jumble. I am not immune here, however. While not as squirrel like, M’s archives extended back into banks that no longer exist and jobs long gone as well. Slowly, over the course of 4 hours we combined and collated the piles into a unified codex and produced a Himalayan pile of rejected archives. Perhaps I was destroying something valuable (might my cell phone bill from Cellular One appear one day on Antiques Roadshow? I doubt I’ll ever be that famous, but a drug addled boozehound business failure anti-intellectual trust fund Connecticut cowboy became president, so anything is possible). As with any good crime, the evidence is always the hardest part to clean up. The act itself is easy, almost liberating and enjoyable. The leftover and consequences are never appreciated until much later. In this case it was a decent sized snowbank of paper that was covered in account numbers and personal information that needed to be destroyed. Unfortunately, the lower class shredder I purchased wasn’t up to the task. In hindsight a ‘liberal elite’ model would have served me better. The motor kept overheating and the room smelled like paper dust and ozone, but at 6pm yesterday the job was largely finished. 4 stuffed kitchen bags of shredded papers plus a stack of non-important non-shredded papers were sent to the recycler, never to be seen again. The guest room closet is almost reclaimed. M and I purchased some plastic boxes that now hold gift wrapping and bags and are under a bed. I can only hope that this great open space stays open, in the spirit of a national park, and isn’t soon cluttered with the strip-mall of American households: old jackets and other un-throwaway-able items.