Archive for January 2nd, 2009

One thing I love to do on New Year’s is clean out (not off) my desk. I have a rule that the correspondence, journal entries, and to-do lists are removed from the desk on or around January 1st and moved into the garage. This year I added another task:  entering the contacts from my old purse-carried address book into the new one. The old address book, bought it in Italy in 2000, is  held together by a rubber band. The new one is shiny and blue, pristine, empty. It doesn’t even really belong to me until I enter in the names.

I enter people into my address book on a pretty casual basis. You don’t have to be my best friend for me to write you down. It could be just because I was driving to your house for an event and worried I would get lost, or you were the head of an organization I belonged to, or we talked about doing something that never really happened, or anything. It’s a lot easier to write the numbers down and not need them than to need a number and not have it when you’re out. Cell phone directory assistance is $3.

I page through the names in the old book, and it’s a trip down memory lane, full of past-tense relationships. In some cases, the business we had is concluded, in others, I’m not sure where these people are. If we don’t communicate any more, I don’t go through the trouble of entering them in the new book.

You might think that means I’ll have a very short job . But there are some names that remain important, which I have returned to again and again, even though they may be written in pencil, even though they live far away. Their addresses change, and I have their new address. These people are my family.

My father, my mother, my mother-in-law, uncles, brothers, yes, blood is thicker than water. Yes, I know where they are. Yes, the relationships may not be perfect, but they’re not negotiable. And even with the “out-laws,” that is, the relatives who were related by the first marriage that ended in divorce,  a couple of them are in, the ex-sister in law who has the farm and has the phone number that belonged to her parents, I send her a Christmas card. And the ex, yeah, I have his cell phone and his health insurance numbers (it’s for his kids). I hope to God someone shows up around here for my daughters that is as much the man he was the year he was 21.

I’m thankful that there are some friends who are clearly in there for life. I wouldn’t drop them out of the list no matter if I hadn’t heard from them in a coon’s age. It really comes down to people you would just pick up the phone and call, if you had to, and they would be glad to hear from you. There aren’t too many people like that.

It seems to me as I wrap up the job, and wrap up the old address book to carry out to the garage, that I actually have just enough people in the new address book. The old standbys are there. And there’s plenty of room for new names. That’s a good way to start a new year, and the new book feels good and looks good. Welcome, 2009.