Before I was eight years old my family had lived in seven different apartments and houses in four cities in two countries. Still to come was the 15-month stretch in which I attended five schools.
The most wrenching part of a move is the sorting and tossing, a process that turns a person into an archaeologist digging up the lost civilization of his own life. Beneath the heaps of books and papers in my Reader office emerged a dozen or so No. 2 pencils that had vanished the moment I stopped having any need for them (when we stopped editing on paper), so many dust-caked paper clips that I gave up on the pile I’d started to make and swept them into a wastebasket, a pink eraser, boxes of the business cards nobody ever asked for anyway, several of those colorfully floppy discs that stories used to be submitted on back in the day, and some chopsticks.
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And I had no intention of taking these files to the Sun-Times. A company besotted with digital aspirations surely has no room or patience for 25 years of manila folders. And it didn’t matter if they did. One lively topic of discussion throughout those 25 years was the Sun-Times. The raw record of that reporting couldn’t wind up in the Sun-Times‘s possession. So I called the Newberry Library. And two days before the movers showed up the Newberry came by, boxed the files, and took everything away. Not so bad. A distinguished research library has deemed my career not a complete waste of time. It believes there’s archival value in the remains!
Cercease Percy’sInamorati.I’m it. His lit-Erati hottie.
There’s a dream a lot of people say they have. They’re back in school and they can’t find their classrooms. They can’t remember their lessons. They can’t function. They don’t know why they’re there. People dream this dream with mounting panic, and then they wake up.
