The Good Old Days

    I found myself ambushed by nostalgia yesterday. I went to Staples to buy printer paper. Not usually a risky thing to do. But roaming the shelves, seeking temptation, I came upon so many things I used to find really desirable - stack trays, multi-part file folders, metal trays for holding pens, special concertina storage wallets, and incredibly expensive laser-printer file folder labels.

It was like coming upon a scene from childhood, hardly thought about in many years, sparking enthusiasms long dormant. I haven’t actually wanted, or yearned for, new black plastic stack trays in many years, but I used to, and there are still a bunch of them, not shiny any more, in my basement. Experiments and adventures in getting my life organized were part of the heady thrill of framing a life as an independent adult, part of the hedonistic pleasure of self-discovery. I don’t feel that way now; partly because I am older and therefore discovering all the ways I lack power, and partly because my struggle to be organized has permanently failed, I think. But mostly, in spite of my surprisingly emotional response to browsing the shelves and spying old trophies, mostly it’s simply because we don’t need any of these things anymore - they’ve all been rendered superfluous by computers.

That, in itself, is good. A schedule spanning my laptop, desktop, and iPod, matched by DropBox, is so vastly more effective and sensible than carrying a DayTimer in the pocket of a jacket I am not wearing today, that there’s really no contest. I keep meaning to sort my CDs, but mostly they are still in boxes from that last time we moved, 10 years ago. Why would I keep all those documents in sub-folders of a green legal binder, when they are all online and backed up? Apart from anything else, it’s so much easier to change my mind about categories on a computer than by relabeling 400 paper folders in a drawer. I still insist on getting paper bank statements however, because I don’t trust banks. They are too cunning; constantly calculating new ways to squeeze one more drop of blood out of a stone; a major reason I feel getting control of my life to be a lost cause.

I do miss the tactile pleasure of unwrapping a new office gadget though, and I still use fountain pens and nice paper. But I no longer delude myself into thinking that a hoard of fine velum and a shiny new gold nib can guarantee a flow of ideas worth writing down. I miss things. In Staples, checking out with a ream of 24 lb paper, I caught myself unexpectedly sad. I felt like a convalescent, like Rip Van Winkle unexpectedly woken by confrontation with a world that has already slipped away, and which doesn’t have much to recommend it, except that the irrelevance of our memories is always painful.

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