My Sunday paper wasn’t here this morning, so while I eagerly and repeatedly check the lobby and outside the front door to see if my requested delivery has arrived, I occupy myself by sipping coffee and straightening stacks of paper — shifting one pile of “file me” documents from one place to another. At least the stacks are now consolidated and on top of the filing cabinet.
While down at the far end of the apartment, my attention is drawn to the old boxes from Nana‘s house that have ended up in my care. I have a vague idea what’s in the boxes — old files, Nana’s writing, Alan’s Sacramento Bee archive of columns from the 1970s — but I haven’t yet taken the time to study it all carefully. Nana’s been gone for just over a year now, and Alan for seven, yet somehow the time never seems right to go through their keepsake documents. So I read a portion of a script written by Nana for WQED in the 1960s about Negro segregation in schools and one of Alan’s columns from 1979 about their Abyssinian cats, Addis and Ababa. I smile to myself. Those cats were older than me. Addis and Ababa died when I was still rather young, but I remember them well. Ababa didn’t like kids. Addis adored Nana. It was a pleasant and comforting image, picturing Nana and Alan in their younger years with their cats and their new home. And I see myself now, perhaps a reflection of their younger years: two dogs, my soon-to-be-wife, a home of my own some day soon. I can only hope to live as fully and be as happy as Nana and Alan were.
I move the boxes back into the closet and look forward to my next forray into the past. Some day I will read through all these treasures of the past. But not just yet.
