Page by page, I carefully leaf through calendars I have kept during the last 23 years of my working life. Countless cryptic notations compel the past to surrender long-forgotten times and faces. Others leave only puzzles… more short-circuits in my aging memory banks. Is anything of importance here?
In many respects, those earlier years peg the high-water mark of my career. Important jobs. Tight schedules. Endless meetings. Hiring and firing. Stress. Voluminous notations prove that it was so.
Family responsibilities eventually compelled me to less intense work. Simply put, a newborn son and a retarded daughter absorbed more time and attention than the jobs were willing to volunteer.
Family-friendly but career-limiting moves caused the notations to gradually subside. Reviewing the old calendars became easier as mundane duties displaced high-profile activities requiring scrupulous documentation. Blank pages became commonplace.
Then I grappled with feelings: throw out the calendars or not? Snapshots of a major chunk of my life, turning loose of them would be a death of sorts. But they had swelled to unmanageable proportions.
Thus one by one, months and years spiraled into the trash. I rescued only two pages. October 21, 1980 has the list of the people I notified when our son was born. And October 2, 1995 contains only two words: "Jenny died". (Jenny was our daughter.) But these two lone pages envelop far more significance than the thousands I destroyed.
It's natural to question decisions and wonder if they were right or wrong. But another page–written by my 20-year-old son on my 55th birthday–helps me sort it out.
"I know that you have always gotten up at night to check on me to make sure I was OK. You often took off work to take my friends and me camping. You took taekwondo (and broke both feet) and went skiing (and tore up your knee) just to be with me. Your life and career have been sacrificed for me. I want you to know that I respect you and admire you more than anyone else that I know for the decisions you have made and the way that you have lived your life."
My cryptic notations continue in new calendars as I write tomorrow's history today, but the scribblings are different. The war on terrorism threatens to consume our most treasured possessions–our children, our families, and our way of life–and I feel heightened anxiety.
Should this war strip one of these treasures from me, a chapter of life will be painfully, forever closed. And if I find myself again flipping the pages of dusty calendars, what will the record show? Will I have spent my time–and my life–in a way that brings joy or regret?
Today is my only opportunity to write my history the way I would want it to be.
Copyright 2001 James McAlister
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