Losing the paper trail
By Cindy Yurth
Tséyi' Bureau
DURANGO, Colo., Dec. 22, 2011
Crowding the margins are notations about whether each person entered in the book sent me a card in a particular year and whether I reciprocated.
And every year, I cross out the addresses that are defunct because the person died or moved and - provided they are still on this planet - I pencil in their new address.
Some people never quite settle. One friend takes up a whole page, so often have I crossed out her address and penciled in a new one. Some people stay in the same place, but you have to keep careful track of their partner of the moment, lest you make a dreadful mistake and address a card to your friend and her ex.
And of course, by the time you hit my age, there are all the widows whose cards (according to my mom the ex-English teacher) have gone from being properly addressed "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith" to "Mrs. John Smith," although I prefer not to saddle them with their dead husband's moniker and just write, "Ms. Ethel Smith."
In the address book, I just cross out the "John and" from "John and Ethel" so I remember not to ask after him in my card.
So anyway, I was looking through the fraying old address book with all the slash marks and remarked to my husband, "This is an old person's address book."
"All address books are for old people," opined Tech Boy without interrupting whatever he was typing on his laptop. "These days, everybody keeps that stuff on their computer."
It's true, and I suppose that some day, perhaps when I retire, I will find the time to enter all my addresses into some sort of electronic spreadsheet. But I can't imagine having the same wave of nostalgia that I feel thumbing through all the X'd out names and places in my old address book.
If I ever get to be famous, which is looking less and less likely as the years wear on, someone could map my friendships and kinships by my address book, as much by the crossed-out entries as by those still accurate.
But future historians who only have access to computer databases will never know that progression. When you change an entry on your computer, the previous entry spins off into cyberspace, leaving no footprint. Unless something is deliberately archived, computer data exists perpetually in the present, like a good Buddhist.
I feel sorry for those future historians.
History is made piecemeal, and all they will ever know is the finished product.
Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" would still be a classic if he had blogged it out on a laptop, but doesn't it say something about the man that he scrawled it on one long scroll of paper?
Mozart jotted down his masterpieces perfectly the first time, while Haydn was prone to second thoughts ... which we would never know had they composed on Finale software the way people do today.
Handwriting analysis, I suppose, will soon be a thing of the past if it isn't already.
If you've ever seen the original copy of the Constitution, or found a love letter from your grandfather to your grandmother in some musty old trunk, you know the thrill is quite different from that of reading something that pops up uninvited on Google.
But there's a more sinister side to this brave new paperless world than just nostalgia.
With no record of revisions, no slash marks on paper, how do we know something has been revised? It will be relatively easy to rewrite history when all our primary sources are liquid letters on a computer screen that can be blanked out at the touch of a fingertip.
Maybe that's OK, as most history just seems to create lingering animosities. At best, it sticks to us like her dead husband's name sticks to a widow.
And anyway, it's been a while since we've written anything as noble as the Constitution, anything that deserves to be preserved behind glass rather than cursorily scanned on a computer screen between Facebook chats.
It's just as well, for example, that you will never know how many times I rewrote this column.