“Why would you hold on to a stack of planners for all those years?” I am expecting a text from those one or two people who will probably be saying as much. So here’s how that happened and what it turned into…..

Throwback: Before we were all walking around with smart phones and mobile calendars in our hands and on our computers, those of us in the workplace – and even outside of the workplace – often used days-of-the-week notebook planners/calendars in order to keep track of our appointments. I absolutely depended on mine for both personal and work-related obligations.

When each year was finished I would copy all the addresses, phone numbers and other pertinent items I might need and transfer them into the new planner for the upcoming year. Then the old one would be stashed in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet in my office for reference, as sometimes information would be needed from prior years. They had occasionally been consulted by Human Resources surrounding the timing of agency issues and they had once been temporarily confiscated regarding a legal investigation. Since they were not taking up any kind of important space, they accumulated without much notice and kept accumulating, until eventually everything went digital and I stopped using them.

These books were filled with a whole lot of private information that went beyond just personal and professional phone numbers, so when I left my job I grabbed them all with the intention of going through them to copy down anything important before destroying them. Of course I never got around to it. They ended up in the attic, that black hole of random accumulation, stacked on top of an old computer monitor and a stainless steel food mill, collecting a whole lot of dust…. for years.

For those who follow…. I have been doing a slow purge in the attic, sort of a Swedish Death Cleaning (which seems to be trending lately). By slow I mean really, really slow. The other day I went up there to retrieve a pair of camouflage colored pool floats to pass on to someone who actually has a pool (I used them only once to go tubing down a local river years ago). Before locating the floats I was distracted by the stack of planners and brought them downstairs too, figuring they would be an easy toss.

Every once in a while there is a “shredding day” where you can bring all the papers holding personal information to be destroyed securely at once instead of putting them into the garbage. That was the plan. Unfortunately, there are not any local shredding days coming up on the horizon, meaning I was going to have to shred them myself. My shredder handles a maximum of twelve sheets at a time. There were eleven books, eleven years worth of a life in “At-A-Glance” planners. I don’t know why other years are missing, but for some reason these were the ones up there in the dust.

Without starting in any particular order, I picked up a random year and began tearing out pages to feed through the machine. Before destroying them I looked at each page, maybe more that just “at a glance”, scanning for any useful information. This was a Big Mistake. That year happened to be what I would call a Very Heavy Year. Incredibly heavy. When I saw some of the things that had been scheduled or highlighted in that book, I began to breathe the way you breathe when you are in such pain that the only way to handle it is to breathe though it – sort of an emotional Lamaze.

Of course there were the usual work related things – hirings, firings, meetings with contractors, engineers, managers, staff, outside agencies, regulatory offices, HR issues, holiday potlucks and lunch dates. And then there were all the other things outside of work. School functions, trips, meetings with guidance counselors. Closings. Court. Vacation schedules. Realtors. Travel plans and airport runs. Dance recitals. Dinners with friends. All sorts of family events. Application due dates. Missed child support payments. Medical appointments. Hospitalizations. Old friends. New friends. Legal issues. Funeral arrangements. The death of a relationship. The start of a relationship. Births. Birthdays. A life at a glance. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

By the time I emptied the pages of that one book I was in tears, with the realization that this was opening up old trauma and was not such a good idea. Thus the next books were tackled with greater speed. I still glanced but I did not linger, instead rapidly skimming through each like cartoon flip books of a life. While doing this, a sense of physical weirdness kept washing over me, like cold water running against my skin.

Every single page of every single book for all of those eleven documented years were FILLED with obligations and reminders. There was barely a break between time slots. Twelve page increments of eleven years, stopping on occasion to let the machine cool down, took an entire afternoon. The container repeatedly became packed to the brim and required emptying a number of times. When I was finished there were four ten-gallon trash bags stuffed tightly with the shredded memories of some significant years of a life. It left me emotionally drained, with the added insult of a backache.

As I began up top, everything is on a computer or phone calendar now, and while I don’t have planner books anymore, I do keep a calendar on my wall. I like the pictured artwork of the month, in addition to having a written backup to all the electronics. Glancing at the wall right now, I can see that the boxes on the page for this month are just about filled with writing. Perhaps it is not because life is so busy at this point, but just that age brings on forgetfulness and it helps to put those reminders in front of you. Once upon a time I used to save all the pretty calendars too, not so much for the information in them, which is rather benign (“Rudi heartworm pill due”, “O’s birthday”, etc.) but for the beautiful photos that they contained, with a plan to do something artistic with them. It never happened.

The planners coughed up a lot of revelations. Memory was jogged, self discoveries were made. Between all the disclosures and reminders, one of the biggest takeaways was this: Clearly the person who owned these planners had carried plenty of responsibility on her shoulders. She was juggling a a whole lot of stuff. If I did not know her and had to make assessments as to who she was during this eleven year block of a life, I would say this person had diverse interests and some strange (yet interesting) experiences and creative ideas. This was a person who experienced some painful and terrible things happening to her and around her during those years, yet you could tell that even during the struggling parts, this was a person who could be counted on, who cared about other people, was a good friend, and loved her family. Someone who did a Very Good Job at work and was a also a Very Devoted Mother. Someone who was resilient. In an odd way, it was helpful to read these from decades beyond, insight gained from the outside looking back in with the opportunity to reassess some critical self-images.

Despite the temporary emotional price, it was freeing to put them through the shredder. All of these entries of a few words, inscribed in little blue-lined slots of time, lined up in vertical segments of days, spread across two pages containing a week, in a book holding fifty-two weeks of a year – a testament to years of a life at a glance, leaving nothing behind but eleven empty covers.

~*~