The Scrapheap of History

I spent a few hours time-traveling yesterday afternoon. It was entirely pragmatic, but I welcomed the opportunity to escape from 2017, given what’s happening in this country and the world.

(I’m typing these words on Presidents Day, which puts a fine point on the depths to which that office has devolved—from Washington to the Worst. Also, the temperatures are in the 60s in February, manifestations of climate change that the current administration has no interest in addressing.)

So. My parents are in their 80s—my dad will be 89 soon—but the closest they’ve come to downsizing from their big split-level house is giving a tiny fraction of their possessions to me to go through and dispose of as I see fit. This fraction comes in the form of scrapbooks my mom compiled from her teen years to the dawn of the 21st century. She’s been giving them to me piecemeal for years, but I think there still are more to come.

The scrapbooks spent decades in my parents’ attic. They look like it. But mostly, they smell like it. When I first started going through them—periodically, as the mood struck me—a couple of years ago, I set up a card table downstairs and strolled down memory lane (sometimes my own memory, other times my mom’s, before I was born) in the comfort of my own home. But Lynn ultimately declared the moldering keepsakes a biohazard. Which was why yesterday I felt on my skin the impact of global warming. The card table, which itself has been banished to the garage, along with all the remaining scrapbooks, was set up on our screened-in, open-air front porch, so as not to release its toxins inside the house.

As our dog, Bean, slept in the sun beside me, I went through four scrapbooks I’d randomly grabbed, not knowing until I opened them which years they chronicled. As it turned out, they were sequential, covering 1978 through 1985. Those were highly eventful years in my life, as it happens, taking me through college and my first jobs. Appropriately, my portable radio was tuned to the classic rock station throughout my time on the porch, providing a soundtrack that was historically accurate much of the time.

On the street below me, where passersby walked their dogs and kids rode their bikes, it was the year in which I’ll turn a shocking 59—the cusp of 60! On the porch, however, I was aging from 19 at the start of my scrapbook excavations to 26 by the end of them. It felt intensely familiar yet happily distant.

I write “happily” because I wouldn’t relive those years for all the tea in China. (As the phrase used to go when China wasn’t yet better known for consumer goods and computer hacking.)

At the dawn of 1978, I was an uncertain and socially inept college student with no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. By the end of 1985, I’d cycled through a trio of jobs and found myself back at the first one by default, for lack of a better plan. I’d acquired and lost my first real girlfriend in that last scrapbook year. I was kind of back at square one.

Not that the scrapbooks told that story. There, I was part of a glowing family narrative, full of achievements and entertainments and special occasions. Every holiday was a happy one. Greensboro, North Carolina, was the cultural capital of the world, judging from the array of orchestra programs, celebrity appearances and ticket stubs. My brother was well on his way to domestic and career success, and I was blowing the competition away in everything I did—in academics, in writings for my college newspaper and literary magazine, as a fledgling journalist after graduation, then as a congressional press secretary on Capitol Hill. Only in 1985 comes a hint of discord, with the scrapbook notation that I returned to my old newspaper job in High Point after an unhappy six-month stint with an employer in downtown DC.

In fact, the end of 1985 was the low point of my adult life—not that I'd exactly felt like I’d been killing it before then, my mom’s rosy commentary and displays of my awards and articles notwithstanding.

I’d graduated from college with a high GPA but no idea what to do for a living other than to apply to newspaper work, since I’d written for my college paper. So, I ended up working for peanuts (and a canned ham as a Christmas bonus) at a middling local newspaper for a few years. Then, because I’d covered politics in my job, I got asked by the local congressman to replace his fired press secretary in DC. I spent a year at that job, was terrified the entire time even though I frankly was given little real responsibility, then was out of work a year later when my boss lost his reelection bid. I spent the subsequent six months—the first half of 1985—living at my parents’ house, being un- or underemployed, and losing my girlfriend because having no money or self-confidence proved to be the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac.

That six-month disaster in DC that had merited a rare down note in my mom’s scrapbook was my job as administrative assistant at an outfit called the National Waterways Conference. Its interest was in barge commerce, or something like that. I honestly never did quite know what the organization was all about, because it was a three-person operation, and my boss was a petty tyrant who somehow had gotten it into his head that I would learn everything I needed to know on the job without any direction from him.

And I thought I’d been terrified working on Capitol Hill! My boss would tell me to compile information on this thing or that—all related, somehow, to transport on our nation’s inland waterways system—and report back to him on my findings. But his only instruction, when I’d ask how I might best educate myself—the Internet and Google didn’t yet exist—was, “Just make some calls.”

“’Calls’? To who? To ask what?”

“Just make some calls.”

“Um, can you please expand on that? With whom might I start?”

By then he’d be seething at my ignorance. He’d finally spit out a contact name, who I’d then call. But that person never would be of much help to me, given that I no context about what I was supposed to be learning.

Every minute was a nightmare. I spent my days fumbling helplessly for relevant information and dreading the sound of my boss buzzing me into his adjacent office. The only other employee, a young female secretary, was sympathetic to my plight but could do nothing to relieve it. The weekends offered no comfort. All I did was count the hours until the renewed hell of Monday morning.   

My single happy memory of that entire half-year was the time I went directly from work to a movie theater on a Friday afternoon to see this crazy horror movie named Reanimator. There was a scene in which a mad scientist held his disembodied head while it vigorously performed oral sex on a woman. The sequence was so outrageous and weirdly campy that it made me laugh out loud, at length. Why, it was almost as if I’d had all these pent-up emotions that need to be excised, whatever the stimuli! Go figure.

Needless to say, my ticket stub from Reanimator was not among the postcards, sugar packets, travel brochures and other archival materials in my mom’s scrapbook of the events of 1985. But later, after I’d removed everything I wanted to keep from those four deteriorating piles of construction paper and thrown the rest into the garbage, I thought long and hard about that dreadful job and the distance I’ve come in the 32 years since I left it.

When I resigned from the Waterways Conference to return to my old newspaper job in North Carolina, my boss audibly scoffed at my surrender, yet insisted on giving me a fancy pen as a parting gift because his inbred manners as a native Alabamian demanded the gesture. But, while I wasn’t thrilled to go back to High Point and my old newspaper job, at least I stopped being terrified. And I was back to doing something at which I was reasonably good. My confidence gradually grew, to the point that I moved on, in late 1989, to another newspaper job in Savannah, Georgia. It was during my three years working there that I began dating Lynn long-distance. I joined her in DC when we got married in November 1992.

Everything since then has been on an upward trajectory. My personal life has never been happier, and my professional one is generally satisfying. (Although make no mistake, I’d exchange it for retirement in a heartbeat.) I’ve done good work at three different membership organizations over the past quarter-century, and I've had great bosses at each stop.

Still, it’s helpful to look back, and it's beneficial to keep perspective.

The Tale of the Scrapbooks, for me, is “this, too, shall pass.” Returning to the present, and staring the socio-political horror that is 2017 squarely in the eye, I can only hope the same phrase applies on a national and global scale.

I mean that literally. Seriously, hoping is all I can do. It’s not like there’s empirical evidence of impending change for the better.