Odd Bits Of Paper
As you regular readers know, I have been working on my memoirs since retiring from paid employment in the spring of 2025. I am now writing about my young adult years after I moved back to California from Wyoming, covering the years 1978-1981. My primary source materials are in a handful of dusty cardboard boxes that sat mostly untouched for decades. Boxes that contain pieces of paper. One of them I had whimsically labeled ‘Nostalgic Memorabilia’.
In August of 1979, my life took an unexpected turn. So long ago. But those dusty boxes contained odd bits of paper that both Karen and I had stashed away. Many were notes we had written to each other. Some were letters I had written to my family in Wyoming. Others were correspondence between Karen and her best friend in New Mexico. I sorted and read and organized notes and letters written on notebook paper, stationary, cards, scrap paper, school assignments, backs of church bulletins. Postmarks were so helpful. Put together, they tell a story.
Keep in mind that I had been living in the same house with Karen’s family for almost a year. I was sharing a bedroom with her brother Darwin, my best friend. Karen and I were beginning to realize, after failed attempts with other people, that something was happening between the two of us. Since we had known each other nearly our entire lives, the idea was shocking. Talking about it was challenging. The Potter house was small. There were almost always other family members around. So, more than once, Karen and I reverted to written conversations, jotting notes back and forth to each other while sitting in the living room or dining room of her family’s home. I guess it was our analog precursor to texting. But, with a key difference. Forty-seven years later, we still have those messages. Regardless of what we wrote, at times so awkward, something about our dialogue still speaks to me as an old, married man about what we were grappling with. With both hope and trepidation, we were asking each other: “Can I trust you with my heart?”
What made that time so powerful, so awesome, so terrifying, was that neither of us had felt that same gravitational pull to give so completely with anyone before. I don’t know how that happens. To this day, I can’t explain how I knew that was the question that Karen needed me to answer. But, I knew. I knew that I wanted Karen to be all in. But the risks felt almost intolerable. Because a heart is a precious, fragile gift that can be so easily broken. Then, as we stumbled our way up to that point of transparency, another unasked question loomed: Could I handle the responsibility of Karen’s heart? I didn’t know, but I wanted to try. So, on August 24, 1979, Karen and I declared to each other that we were ‘going steady’. I know, because it’s in writing. A year later, August 24, 1980, Karen’s friend Brenda wrote a letter which congratulated her on our ‘one year anniversary’. Well, it hadn’t been the ‘steadiest’ year, to be sure. But Karen and I stayed together. A couple of months later we were engaged. Less than a year later, on July 18, 1981, we were married. Of course, both Darwin and Brenda were in the wedding party.
My friend in Singapore has started a new blog. A recent post of his (keeping-what-we-write) made me realize again, why I want to preserve paper and ink. Oh, I make use of the Internet and messaging and we have tens of thousands of photos in ‘the cloud’. But I have worked in the I.T. industry. I know what happens to data over time. It decays. Software standards change. Computer hardware becomes obsolete.
But I can still pick up a piece of paper that contains the heart expressions of an idealistic young man written to a beloved young woman almost 50 years ago. I can read it without an internet connection or electricity or a screen, feeling much the same emotion that stirred my heart long ago. And also see how little my odd, ironic sense of humor has changed. As my ever-accumulating memories lose their sharpness, I am grateful for tangible, physical evidence of a trust that was extended long ago and is still being earned all these decades later.
As I looked at all those scraps of paper, I wondered about what has been lost as digital communication — in text, e-mail, video — has come to replace paper: the recognition of a person by their handwriting - almost like hearing their voice; the unique gift of a handmade envelope - folded and tucked and annotated like no other envelope before or since; the explicit trust that a sealed letter will only be opened and seen by the intended recipient; the hope that the minutes or hours poured into the pages will be read with as much care and intensity as they were written.
Will someone 40 or 50 years from now be able to look back at vital and potent messages sent over any number of digital pathways? Will they be able to see how one person stood by them and grew with them in friendship during their tumultuous, emotion-laden teenage years and all the years since? Or will it all be lost in a great cauldron of decaying bits and bytes swirling somewhere on an unplugged internet server?
Only pieces of paper with symbols scribbled on them. Yet far more than that. With literal meaning, yes, in the language they are written, but far deeper meaning to the two people that piece of paper bound together in some inexplicable way long, long ago. Tomorrow will mark 47 years of ‘going steady’ with the girl who gave me her heart. I know. Because I have it in writing. And because she has told me in so many ways since.
