TIM AND TOM COME BY
While trying to decide about the Germany trip I suddenly was faced with my first big event in my new apartment. I have invited the ladies that I for eat lunch with after going to church on Sunday at the Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church to come to my apartment for Sunday lunch. Kathe sang in the choir for years and served on committees hosting funerals and weddings. Going to the Warren Wilson Presbyterian church is a way of keeping in touch with old friends and making some new friends. This lunch group is all women on canes. The elevator was immobilized after Helene over a year ago, but now is fixed, so all of them, leaning on their canes, can make it to my second floor apartment.
Kathe was the hostess in all of our years together. I am clueless. But Susie is helping me. But first, before the ladies come, the two of us have been trying to sort through the last 15 boxes which were in my locker in Swannanoa for thirty years and are now cluttering my apartment. It turns out that most of these last boxes to be sorted were family papers, some letters and notes that I made while traveling and teaching, some my mother had save, some geneology and papers of ancestors her brother, my Uncle Gene, had given us, some from my Grandfather Mosher. Somehow my family has become the family repository. We went through most of these, page by page, and threw away things that weren’t personal but also kept a lot.
Throwing away any of the personal papers feels like erasing the memory of the person who wrote them, even my own memory, making it seem that the person didn’t exist, doesn’t exist. There is for me the realization that everything that matters to me doesn’t matter at all, including the activities that I feel are so important now, like going to Germany or even being the keeper of my relatives papers or simply doing errands. Somehow I feel that my activities are significant even when they are of little importance to anyone else. Sometimes I realize that actually most of my life has already vanished, not leaving a trace, and that today is vanishing even as I write.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 