For The Record

     I used to blame my friend Gordon.  He is an inveterate and unapologetic scrapbooker (which I do believe is now a verb!) and I’m sure that within minutes of our first meeting he was showing me his (then) current one.  I think it was number 50-something, counting all that he had done since he began them as a 17-year-old college student at Willamette University.  “Back in the dark ages,” he says.
     He tells me that he is now on number 110, allowing for a couple that are still bits and pieces in a drawer.  He had a few energy-less years after his friend Roy died, but he’s hard at it again.  Partly, he’s been prompted to continue the record of his ‘life and times’ by the interest of Betsy Millard, Director of the Columbia Pacific Heritage Museum.
     She has urged Gordon to give his collection to the Museum which I believe he is going to do.  “It’s a great record of Peninsula life for a finite period of time and among an interesting group of people,” she claims.  There seemed to be a small glitch in the plan, at first, because Gordon doesn’t always identify people or places or events.  He’s much more likely to find an appropriate quip in the New Yorker – meaningful to him and his friends but perhaps not explanatory enough for posterity.
     Undaunted, Betsy has been talking him through the pages, one scrapbook at a time.  She records him as he identifies and describes – a sort of oral history set to pictures.  Gordon says that he and Betsy are up to number 77 now.  Eventually, the albums and their accompanying recordings and/or transcripts will be available to researchers of local history.
     I can only claim 93 scrapbooks to date but, after all, Gordon has ten years on me.  And, as I was looking mine over, I realized that the first one I did was back in the 1950s, well before Gordon came into my life – so I can’t blame him after all.  However, my first efforts were sporadic; they didn’t become a year-by-year proposition until well into the 1980s.
     Too, I must admit, my scrapbooks are not all about my own life, fascinating though it may be.  (Ahem!)  There are a number of other subjects I have felt compelled to document.  During many of my teaching years I kept scrapbooks about each of my classes – the field trips we went on, the programs we presented, the science fairs and Grandparents’ Days and Art Fairs.
     During the Bookvendor Years there were scrapbooks about events at the store – author signings and poetry readings and various book celebrations.  Then there are the Family Albums with the pictures that have lain fallow in boxes and drawers here for three or four generations.  I’m still working on those – The R.H. Espy Family, the H.A. Espy Family, the Little Family etc.
     There are also ongoing Oysterville scrapbooks – several of the church, updated year by year with bulletins and photographs from summer vesper services, pictures of wedding preparations, and Christmas programs.  There is the fat album called “Structures of Oysterville” with  the various buildings in the village at different points in their history.  Some, by now, are gone completely and I’m always delighted to run across an old photo or note about them and add it to the book.
     And, of course, there are several scrapbooks about this house and its contents and… it goes on and on.  It could easily be a full-time occupation.  It’s obviously a sickness…  On that point Gordon and I agree perfectly!