All the News That Was Fit to Print
Atlanta, GA
January 29, 2020
As my younger son was walking out the door yesterday morning, he asked if I had a scientific calculator.
“I’m not sure. When do you need it?”
“Today. I have a math test.”
“When did you learn you needed a scientific calculator?”
“Yesterday. I just forgot to mention it. The teacher thought we all had one from last year. I just managed without one.”
Not knowing whether to be annoyed at his delinquency this year or proud of his math acumen last year, I quickly scoured the house. With David needing to go to school, I thought quickly where the long-neglected object might be. Like Schliemann seeking Troy, I had no proof that what I sought actually existed, but was certain that it did. So I started shoveling ancient soil.
In a corner of our bedroom is an escritoire…a secretary long used by my maternal grandmother, and eventually bequeathed to us. There, in a leather case stuffed into a side slot, lay the hidden treasure.
Beside a pair of antique Russian opera glasses, a rental car receipt from a 2000 trip through the south of France, and the in-room phone instructions from the Hotel Mona Lisa in Florence, was the HP 41-CK calculator I purchased when I started my freshman year at Georgia Tech. I don’t think I have touched it since my senior year ended, but am certain I used it almost every day in between.
The battery was of course long-dead. I brought the device to David anyway, forgetting his practical needs and indulging my nostalgic curiosity.
“Look at this, David. I used this in college. Would this work for you?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. Is it a calculator?”
“Yes. Do you know how to use it?”
“Uh… yeah”, he said impatiently, as if I’d asked him how to use a spoon when confronting a bowl of ice cream. He stared at me, backpack over shoulders that kept trying to turn toward the door. I pressed on.
“I ask because you use it the opposite of a normal calculator. You don’t press “2 X 2 =” to get four. Instead, you type “2 {enter} 2 X” to get 4.”
“Oh…then, no. I guess I don’t know how to use it.”
“That’s OK. The battery’s dead anyway.”
“Dad, I really need to go. I’ll borrow a calculator from someone at school.”
“OK. But this is pretty cool isn’t it?”
“Bye, Dad.”
As I returned the calculator to its case, and the case to its slot, I noticed a few other documents in the secretary. One was eight years older than the calculator. On several pieces of folded paper, stapled to form a binding, was a small “book” I had written as a child. It was my attempt at an “almanac” chronicling important dates, data, and events in the lives of several pre-teen Tampa boys scattered across Davis Island.
As I read and winced my way thru these early writings, I recalled a larger collection I thought might be stored in our basement. Since my excavation had already begun, and the air still thick with dust, I decided to keep digging.
I descended to the basement, and looked under a wooden shelf in the rear storage room. There, in perhaps a half-dozen folders, were scores of hand-written articles from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. These “newspaper” accounts of our daily activities were stashed in a fragile box sitting on the floor. The warped cardboard had somehow shielded its contents from our basement flood last year.
I unfolded the box of papers, and opened a can of worms. I realized that, like a fuse to a bomb, those childhood writings led inexorably to these infantile emails. They were early versions and harbingers of these epistles, but with less pomposity and more of a point.
And, like a Melville novel or a Haydn symphony, I spared few details. On the outside of the folder labeled “July/August 1980”, I informed future archaeologists that “Most of these papers were written and then put in plastic bags. The paper clips were put on in June 1981 when the bags were removed.”
What a relief. I can’t imagine stumbling upon these documents after forty years, and not understanding the origin of the paper clips! And we can all rest easy knowing what became of the plastic bags. Still, they would have come in handy had the cardboard not miraculously parted that basement flood.
Had it not done so, we would be deprived the only extant announcement of a very prominent wedding that took place “under a pine tree” on August 27, 1983. A week later, we learned that the happy couple’s new house was being renovated, and that their unlucky four year-old dog (Winston) would undergo a far less pleasant procedure.
He never returned. The next week’s edition reminded that while at the vet to be neutered, he died from causes that were “unknown”…or at least that were not disclosed to us.
As the hour passed, I had to get to work. I replaced the papers in their folders, the folders in their box, and the box on it’s shelf. Walking upstairs, I smiled at the thought of those juvenile chronicles, which served as inadvertent diaries.
I don’t know what happened to most of the kids I wrote about. But I am aware the misfortune that has befallen two of them. One is in jail. The other received a worse sentence. He is reading this.
The former was my best friend when those early papers were penned. He became an attorney, bilked his clients a few years ago, and will spend the next 10-15 in the hoosegow.
The latter is my brother. Despite starring in most of these pre-pubescent publications, their reach was not wide enough to inflict lasting damage. Unlike for the unfortunate readers of these missives, the Internet had not yet arrived to burden the innocent audiences of an analog age.
But that calculator was pretty cool. And that happy couple is still married. And on a cruise.
JD
