(Originally posted on LiveJournal)
So, now that I am launching into a new era of my life (having at last left Jeopardy! and its fine folks behind me), I have to do some major reorganizing in the apartment. Over the course of 18 years as a researcher, I’d collected a very nice selection of reference books on various topics. And now they’ve come home. Where I don’t have enough shelves. So I have to sort through still more things, to put more into storage, to make space for the reference books I want available in the apartment.
Anyway, on the bedroom closet shelf there’s been a largish box of papers sitting there for many years. So this weekend, I pulled it down and started sorting through it. A lot of it was 12 year old financial records that could now be thrown out. Some of the things were old Christmas cards – which were fun to read through (before parting with many of them). Old pictures of friends with their families (What fun to look at a picture and go “Well, that child just graduated from high school!”).
In the midst of all this, were several sheets of paper as precious to me as gold leaf! The original manuscripts of a handful of poems. Some of these poems were composed for specific friends. I know I’d copied them out for the friends, but I had not gotten them into the “Poetry Book” (a notebook with poems written out in a fair hand) or gotten them typed into the computer. They were, in effect, lost to me… and frankly, I feared they were lost forever. That was a real disappointment to me for quite a long time.
But….. HERE THEY WERE!
Oh, joy! Oh, rapture!
Yes, I’m going to get them typed onto the computer quickly. And a couple of them, I want to find free images for backgrounds to them, to put them up on my website (along with the ones already there — though I really want to redo the backgrounds and lettering on those).
Seriously, it was something that gnawed at me, that I’d lost those manuscripts. I knew the poems were good. A couple of other ones, I had copied them onto the computer. But there’s something about the original manuscript that holds a magic for me. The page I worked on, trying out phrases in my head before writing them down. Little tweaks and adjustments. The physical object brings the experience back to me. It’s precious.
(And of course…. there is that egotistical corner of my mind that says they might be of historical value some day. Like I’ll have a literary legacy or something. The archivist who deals with my papers has all my sympathies, for they’re not stored in any order. But at least most everything had dates on it! Heh.)
Comments
wellinghall – Jul. 8th, 2008
Yay! *happy hugs*
scribblerworks – Jul. 9th, 2008
Thank you!
sartorias – Jul. 8th, 2008
Hurray for finding lost goodies!
scribblerworks – Jul. 9th, 2008
