Daily Blague

Day Two of Team Vacation was easier to take in every way. We knew what we were going to do; we did it. We were in and out of Manhattan Mini Storage in half an hour, and that includes the wait for the car that Kathleen called for to take us home. (Both days, we've taken the bus downtown.) And we knew something of what to expect from boxes that hadn't been opened in the past seven years. Some memories are plainly painful, but for the most part the boxes contain lives headed on a different course, lives of a different complexity. Actually, I would say that my life was complicated when I first set up the archival boxing system that I'm undoing now. Now my life is complex. There's a consistency to it, and a clarity of commitment, that was missing fifteen and twenty years ago. The boxes remind me, basically, that I used to be a mess. A functional slob, lurching from one distraction to another, and always worried about boredom. Now I am only worried by my blood pressure.

Back home with our second set of seven large document boxes - the six that we plan to fetch tomorrow will finish this cahpter - we gleefully discovered that several were full of utterly disposal items, such as phone bills from the late Eighties. For a while, Kathleen and I were simply carrying the small boxes out to the rubbish chute and dumping them into the compactor's maw. There were two more boxes of letters, though, and a lot of stuff pertaining to my father's estate - including letters that he wrote several years before he died, chiding me for my ignorance of the tax laws. I was tempted to throw these out, but without reading every letter all the way through several times, I wouldn't have known where the accounting stopped and the attachment began. I did a lot of wincing, but I tried to go through it manfully, and in the end my decision to keep most of it was inspired by the conviction that to dispose of the awkward and disagreeable would be dishonorable. I'm not sure that I'd handle things better now. I like to think that I would, but the point is that I was, as I say, a mess.

By the time we could clear the dining table, we had whittled the contents of fourteen boxes down to the contents of four. These have all been given clear Post-It labels, provisional until we finish the job tomorrow, and stacked in the blue room. Two of the small boxes (should I be talking of "inner" and "outer" boxes here?) contain notebooks that are mostly empty but whose opening pages are sullied by aborted attempts at fiction. To my project list I have added the task of reading these productions, summarizing them, and unleashing the full fury of my critical acid upon them, whereupon the notebooks will vaporize, or at least follow the old phone bills into the compactor. One of the fictions - story or novel, I can't tell, and I probably didn't know at the time - begins with a line about someone named Armand who had imaginary friends when he was a boy. "Write what you know," they say, and all I can say is that I didn't even have imaginary friends when I was a boy. Nor did I ever know anyone named "Armand." Happily, the day eventually dawned when I realized that I lack almost every gift that the writing of fiction, as distinct from the writing of prose, requires. But that is another story.