My Paper Piles of Shame

To my friends and neighbors, I appear to be an Organized Person.  My kitchen is usually under control, and a peek inside my cabinets will reveal dear little labels specifying what goes where.  They’re in my freezer, too.  My closet is small, but I do feel a teensy bit smug that my clothes are organized by type and color, while lounging on matching Huggable Hangers.

Just don’t go into my home office.  Now, before you call the film crew for “Horders,” know that it doesn’t look all that bad.  You might think I’d been extra busy the past few weeks, so I’ve shoved some papers into a few piles.  The problem with these piles isn’t their volume, but their age.  They’ve been there forever. 

Many reams of paper have flowed in and out of my office following the proper procedure.  Bills are eventually filed.  Recipes are eventually tossed.  But there’s something about these particular sheets that freeze me in my tracks.  I just don’t know what to do with them.

A brief excursion into one pile produces the following:

• The front section of a newspaper dated March 22, 2010 that reads, “HOUSE PASSES HEALTH REFORM.”   I miss Obama’s smile.

• A notice from my bank dated February 22, 2008 encouraging me to sign up for overdraft protection.  Did I ever do that?  No idea.

• From July 20, 2010, a seven-page transcript of my online chat with an Apple tech support supervisor (Mike, BTW), trying to help me sync the calendar on my iPhone with my MacBook.  Synchronicity eludes me still.

• A letter from my dear friend Lisa dated November 1, 1988, in which she gave my new boyfriend her seal of approval.  Eventually, he lost it.

Before you freak out that my piles date back to the Reagan administration, let me stress that this relic came from cleaning out some old boxes in my parents’ garage.  But what to do with it?  Keep it for myself?  Send it to Lisa?  Toss it?  It’s not one of the better examples of our correspondence (she goes on to describe a bout of food poisoning), but it’s from my history, people.

The other papers alternate between mementos and to-dos, but none of them have a final resting place.  I can’t muster the energy to curate a personal museum, and more pressing to-dos have shoved aside the old ones.  So they continue to languish in piles, mocking me, until one day, their disintegration will decide the matter.