After the advent of the Model T there must have been a period during which householders occasionally would peer wistfully at the back of the barn where their once shining carriages now sat collecting dust.
Thus do I find myself gazing, nostalgically and with preposterous fondness, at the squat, battered, green leather ring binder that has, for 20 years, kept my life in order.
Thick enough to stop a bullet and heavy enough to stun a burglar, the “big green thing,” as my family calls it, has been my companion since before I had a husband and children.
But it’s time to say goodbye.
The Filofax’s bulging pages turn out not to be quite as useful in keeping track of events, now that there are seven in our family. And as tasteful the ivory paper and as delicate the lines in the address section may be (each entry, quaintly, has space for “fax”), they’re totally unhelpful for storing e-mail addresses.
So, like the farmers who, in the early 20th century, forlornly watched their horses being led away, and went off to buy one of those newfangled tractor things, I’m being compelled to embrace the new.
And, I have to say, it’s almost comical how much more efficient a laptop is at making sense of a family’s calendar. After a tutorial at the Apple store, I’ve managed to transfer all our schedules — all the doctor’s appointments, swim team practices, weekend barbecues, column deadlines, vacation events, even some of next year’s important school dates — into a sleek and easily manipulated matrix that can pop effortlessly from day to week to month. Each person is even color-coded! Super cool!
Plus, this ought to pop a cork in the mouths of friends who have long lampooned my techno-wary household as “1900 House.” Take that, techie friends!
And yet.
Yet I can’t help but feel a bit gloomy, saying goodbye to this inefficient relic of the Reagan era. The Big Green Thing has been closer to me than my own family. It’s traveled all across Asia and Europe; it even went to Africa once. It’s lived in New York, and Tokyo, and London, and Toronto, and it’s acquired the stickers and wads of business cards to prove it.
Snapping it open, as I am doing now for probably one of the last times, I find forgotten tokens of vanished days: my grandmother’s address, written when she was alive; a hastily dashed list of guests from a forgotten dinner party; the penciled-in name of the Holocaust survivor who sold us our first house.
Here, too, are mementos that can’t be moved on to a computer: a dog-eared love note in my husband’s handwriting; a stack of crumb-edged baby pictures. And — oh, my word — I just found a sonogram image from 1999. I suppose I could scan them all and load them up and color-code them by year … but that wouldn’t be the same, would it?
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
