I loved that song Jim Croce sang in 1972 about saving time in a bottle. I’m saving time in a virtual Gigabytle.
I finally finished shooting – copying – digitizing and archiving about 30 years of large, desk pad calendars. I first mentioned the project in an earlier post. They were referred to as desk pads, but mine was always on my home-office wall.
Some of them shouted the month and year in LARGE FONT, like breaking news headlines, while a couple series appear to have had little interest in going public with the current month or year.
My personal, historical notations are the most significant inscriptions, but an extra treat was finding several ticket stubs. They were tickets to events, now they’re tickets to the past. They are, along with name tags, sticky notes, and other souvenirs, fastened to appropriate days or nearby margins.
When I put all the months in order, I found that some were missing. January 1990 is missing, as is August 1995. The entire years of 1998 and 1999 are missing. Maybe we tried an alternative calendar then, but two random, single months? My perfect alibi is shot.
Maybe in those missing months, I urgently needed some crushed paper packing materials, or something to quickly protect the floor under the cat-food dish.
I’m solid from September 1976 through 2007, except for those missing pages – those missing memories. It’s not that they aren’t filed away in the database of my mind, it’s that the physical calendar pages turned out to be the “product code” that unlocks them.
If anyone has been waiting for the opportunity to rewrite a little history, I’m accepting bids on a full set of like new, never marked, but naturally aged 1980 (20″ X 25″) calendar pages.