Stories

About 15 years or 20 years ago I started writing what turned out to be an unintentional book. 

I hadn't found all the ancestors I wanted to find yet, but I had gained a reputation around the family for collecting old photos and instead of throwing them away, people sent them to me. I scanned all the photos and slides starting with the birth of my older sister and ending at the year we had all gone our separate ways and were no longer a family as we'd been. There was no single place we were all coming home to anymore. That covered 27 years. 

I split the mishmash of 8mm movie clips that had been transposed to DVD into shorter segments and dated them. I cropped and color-corrected all the photos. The slides had to be professionally cleaned because I couldn't do it at home without dying from the inhalation of alcohol fumes. I scanned and dated all of those because thankfully someone had put dates on them in pencil. Then I split the whole works into folders by year and then I moved them around and renamed them individually so the story line was in order. 

In some cases the pencil dates were wrong because a photo that belonged to a certain story line was attached to the wrong year. But with time and persistence, eventually I had it lined up pretty well.

At that point I went back to the pesky missing ancestors and got obsessed with DNA. A totally different story. 

When I came back to the photos and movie clips I realized no-one in the future was going to understand this without captions. So I set my sights on putting captions on each photo and a simple text document to catalogue the movie clips. I might have been 5 minutes into this when I realized it was a really bad idea. What I thought I should do instead, and started to do, was create a document for each year and write a brief description of a whole year at a time, 27 times, using the pictures as memory triggers.  

I thought that would be a fairly efficient approach and I'd be done in no time. 

Of course I couldn't stop there because what was most interesting to me about the stories was what was going on behind the camera, not what was in front of it. Who cares about "4 girls sitting in the living room in November"? 

I convinced myself it wouldn't be a good idea to leave a lot of imagery without an explanation of, "What in the world was going on there?" This was clearly demonstrated to me by an acquaintance who was looking through an album one day, back when I had albums ...  which can be a really boring thing to do, looking at other people's pictures when you don't know any of the people involved. He turned a page, turned to the previous page, turned forward and then back again several times and said, Happy kid, then sad kid, what happened here? He really wanted to know.

By now each folder of photos and videos has a document called [Year] The Story. I work in outline form in ActionOutline and when I make additions or changes to a year, I save it as RTF and overwrite it in the appropriate folder. If I print the entire thing now it's 132 pages including a brief intro of Mom and Dad at the top, how they met, married, where they lived and how they imagined their future before it launches into the kid pics and the reality of watching it all play out. 

As I've written I've gone further and further into the labyrinth. At times I've felt in a hurry to finish it because, you know, the past is the past. At times I've taken breaks from it for months. And then a memory pulls me back looking for the right words. 

It's my book; I get to write it any way I want it. Sometimes I draw pictures. Sometimes I write short vignettes as sub-items. I found the first house I lived in on Google Maps. The surprising thing about this is that the Google Street View car had been down that street for the first time ever only one month before I went looking for the house and that was last year. I could see it from 3 sides close up and zoom in on the side of the back porch. Although I couldn't see the back door I imagined my father walking through it. I checked out the whole neighbourhood like it was yesterday on my tricycle. I wasn't supposed to leave the yard but I used to go all the way to the end of our block and back.  

The way the years are set up to save and re-save by overwriting, it's an endless book. Like Margaret Atwood said, "It's just between you and the wastebasket." Perspectives change. It will stop when I stop. Sometimes the stories take off into strange lands and serve the job of a psychiatrist and there I am seared to my core seeing myself reflected back through the words that come out of me. The past is oftentimes nowhere near as past as we think it is. You may or may not want to do this to yourself. 

Estates

I'm used to looking at old Wills. I particularly like the ones where all the person's possessions are listed on one page. They lived before shopping centers. Property lines were written as extending to so-and-so's fence line. No GPS. 

I don't know this for a fact but I'm guessing the reason people wrote their Wills on one page was because all their worldly possession could fit on one page. 

This is not exactly relevant to filing historical documents but it's interesting to note the difference between past and present. I only mention this because a cousin is presently dealing with her mother's estate where she listed all her worldly possessions, down to the nails holding coffee cups on the wall, as a codicil to her Will. In other words, a binding legal document. 

Oh.My.GOD.

And, of course, the lawyers won't let it go. And she's been up til 1 o'clock multiple mornings creating a spreadsheet for them. 

There's a big difference between a compact listing of 1 pitchfork, 1 basket, 1 horse, 1 cow and calf, 1 plough, potatoes in the field, 1 iron kettle, 1 bed and bed clothing, 2 slaves ... and 6,000 items from your favourite mall and London Drugs. 

As far as I could tell from listening to this on the phone there are 3 items of enduring value; two paintings and a wedding ring. This is happening in British Columbia so there are other household categories for probate; furniture, clothing, and electronics at Fair Market Value.

I'm not a legal scholar so I work from common sense if I can. 

I wrote a Will a long time ago. I haven't changed it since. It covers where my money goes. Full stop. 

And then there's my household full of 21st century possessions, just the regular stuff everyone has; linens, clothes, kitchen utensils, ubiquitous plastic. This is not part of my Will. Because some of it changes. I break things. I send things to recycling. I don't need the trouble of writing a new Will every time I go shopping. 

I don't have a single thing that would increase in market value over time; jewellery, rare manuscripts, antiques, coin or stamp collections. What I have for my Executor is a list. I wrote it as a map in case he was looking for something in particular. To save him the bother of having to look everywhere.

After listening to my cousin and doing a little research I realized I needed to put an asterisk next to things that need to be included for probate. Most of it doesn't. 

I have another document that says where I want particular items sent to. Not much but a few things of possible value to others. Like genealogy files on external hard-drives and a 70-year old sewing machine that still runs and still repairs my clothes and a few paper files (too many actually). 

What I'm saying is if you don't need to complicate your life with a codicil listing of everything in your bathroom cabinet, don't. This is not legal advice so check the requirements of your specific locality. 

Yet Another To-Do List, Plan B

 Obviously I'm not solving the world's big problems here.

I love index cards. I love them so much I almost purchased multi-colored ones. After working this system for awhile, I managed to get half my projects finished. So it did give me the focus I was looking for. Then I was distracted by a couple of unexpected events and when I came back to my bulletin board it was covered with other paper and I was deep into creating my 2026 gardening calendar and I lost track of where I was with the index cards. 

My 3 x 4 foot magnetic bulletin board isn't big enough. I need a bulletin WALL. 

I've thought about getting a smartphone so I can have my external brain with me every second of the day but there's two issues with that. First, my eyes can't manage a screen that small. Two, it's overkill for my lifestyle. I'm not driving and flying all over the place. I don't need to be reading text messages while simultaneously navigating a sidewalk banging myself into light standards. I don't need to be instantly accessible to everyone in the world. Or vice versa. It's on a par with opening a Facebook account. I keep thinking about it but in 20 years I still haven't done it. 

I read that successful people don't keep to-do lists. They put everything on their calendar. This could well be true. Something I have noticed over time is that everything on my calendar gets done. Some of what I put on paper gets done but paper tends to wander at my house. 

I had to seriously look at the insanity of keeping a notebook and pen in every corner where I might have an interesting thought. I'm not saying this is not an interesting method, actually it's quite chaotic but, since most of my clothes don't have pockets, one fix would be to wear a belly-bag 24/7 and have one (small) notebook and one pen.

I've tried paper calendars. A day planner is too big for me to carry around, even from one room to another. A smaller calendar is too small. I've tried printing calendars, one month per page. I've tried posting them to my bulletin board. I've tried keeping them in a 3-ring binder. They all require that I'm tethered to a pencil and eraser.

I have an E-notebook for thinking out loud and doodling but the calendar function is not sophisticated enough for my taste. Even if it was I'd be constantly wondering which room I left it in. 

I don't keep files in The Cloud. I don't need to sync between devices. I don't even keep the WiFi turned on at home. 

So, my single calendar is on my desktop computer. Yes, some of us old dinosaurs still use desktops. 

Since I use the desktop to check my email it makes sense to have my calendar in the same place. 

I tried the calendar method some years ago but never got it quite finessed. I'm trying again. Anything recurring daily or weekly doesn't sit well on a calendar because it clutters up the place. The fix I found for this is to put an asterisk before a recurring item and drag and drop it to its next date instead of having it already there multiple times. As with the index cards, I only put one item per day to be worked on for a limited amount of time, an hour say. 

The other thing is to categorize those items with a color; small color bar in the case of Thunderbird calendar, maybe a colored font in others. This helps to know where the end of the line is when dragging items forward. Creating multiple calendars in different colors, although it looks nice, is actually not a good choice as each calendar has to be backed up separately. If you're trying to simplify your life, multi-colored calendars is a digital rabbit hole too far.

All this to say, it doesn't matter what or where your calendar is, if to-do lists make you crazy, try your calendar. It's a more authoritative voice. The calendar says, Here in this box is what you need to get done today. A to-do list says, Here's the stuff you should do but if you don't it will still be here tomorrow and too often it is.