It’s been seven months since I’ve done one smick of work on a scrapbook. I don’t know if that has to do with Gordon’s shuffling off and leaving me in the scrapping lurch, but suffice it to say that his death and my cease-gluing happened about the same time. One of the final pages in my last completed scrapbook was a birthday card from Gordon – mailed posthumously by his niece Karen from his file of greeting-cards-ready-to-send.

Gordon and I seldom talked about our respective scrapbooking obsessions. It was something we had both done for years – he since early adulthood, me since childhood which, when I think about it, must have been about the same time. (He was ten years older than I.) But, we enjoyed looking at one another’s latest endeavors and talking about the ‘why’ of it all. We never came to any conclusions about it (or anything else.)

Our scrapbooks were so different – his pages punctuated with New Yorker cartoons and mine leaning more to the self-explanatory with programs and ticket stubs and various invitations interspersed among the photographs. Even so, for the past thirty-five years (since I moved to the Peninsula and met Gordon and Roy, or ‘Gore and Roar’ according to Gordon) my books and his books have frequently contained photos and information about overlapping experiences and mutual friends. That was the fun of comparing!

To Be Sorted… Today!

So, on Saturday I began the endless-seeming process of catching up with the last seven months. More-or-less systematically I’ve been tossing potential scrapbook stuff into a large cardboard box in my office. “Stuff” includes newspapers as well – mostly Chinook Observers so that I can clip out my columns and other articles I’ve written. (I’m not sure why I do that either. I believe it’s a carry-over from my high school journalism classes when we were required to keep a scrapbook of all our column inches.)

Finding the articles in those back issues, of course, seems to demand more than just skimming through. I have to admit that I don’t always read the paper very thoroughly week by week, so this catching up process often involves reading months-old news for the first time. It is illuminating to say the least. In these seven months, some of the news stories have played out, some cutting-edge information has proved inaccurate and, some editorials and guest columns have seemed absolutely prescient.

In spite of the occasional frustrations in wanting to ‘correct the record,’ I am enjoying this first step in the catch-up process. It’s an interesting way to view recent history and gives a little window on my oft-expressed wish, “If only I could go back in time for a day.”