Throwing out my files

Three years ago I retired and I am still sorting folders of papers.  I’m not talking about those icons on our computer screens here.   I mean real file folders, the original article and a significant feature of my pre-electronic academic life.  Despite rounds of purging and pitching, a distressing number of folders survived.

My dear friend and colleague Nora used to exhort me that no academic problem was hopeless if you could organize it into file folders.  New and fresh ones were the key, she said.  Turning previously used ones inside out might remind you of past projects that did not end well. When folder supplies in our department storage closet ran low, Nora would alert our lackadaisical secretary to the impending file folder crisis.  

For countless years the folders were a smooth creamy color called “manila.”  A bow to global economics here---the name is from the abaca plant (a banana relative) indigenous to the Philippines.  Since hemp had been the source of fiber for centuries, the abaca fiber was called “Manila hemp.” Strong, durable, and water-resistant, Manila hemp was used for rope in ship riggings. Cultivated in the Philippines since the 1500s, it was cheap to produce, biodegradable, and lustrous in texture. Manila hemp went into rugs and hats and paper. 

The manila file folder, humble office servant, had wide and distinguished affiliations.  

Some five years before I retired, however, a revolution burst into academic office life.  Without forewarning, it seemed, file folders blossomed in different colors. Suddenly the manila haven of calming uniformity---and research impartiality---was invaded by riotous color.  

  

It must have been a Pendaflex catalog that roused our fainéant secretary to action.  She ordered boxes of colored folders, crates perhaps.  The department supply closet was narrow; its shelves rose to the ceiling tiles.  A rickety paint-spattered five-foot step ladder was wedged into a corner behind the door.  The incoming boxes of colored files---stacked in no particular order---displaced the old manila boxes upward.  When grabbing a folder from the supply closet shelves, five different colors met me at eye-level. Not much of a spectrum in the fine arts, but for me in the social sciences an unsettling dilemma. 

The alternative?  Close the door, open the rickety ladder and climb up to the manila boxes and heave a clutch of folders down to the floor.  

I made my peace with the new regime, of course.  Such is the power of office supplies. A color code even began to emerge in my personal file drawers. When by beset by campus politics, student complaints, and research deadlines, I could therapeutically fritter a quarter hour refining the color code. 


Folders of new course ideas gravitated to green (verdant with brainstorms for courses and articles).  Yellow housed student records (names easily readable on the light tab).  Campus committee work was relegated to red, a reminder of the principle of  administrative emergency.  Red folder in hand, I appeared passionately concerned and was less likely to forget my notes and doodles laying on the table at meetings.  

My favorite shade, however, was a pale, milky violet which I reserved for my contracts and promotion and tenure files.   Always a comfort to pull up a folder from this color group and remind myself that the College had once granted me a raise or nominated me for an award.   That I had a number (in the single digits) of insightful articles published.  That indeed a few students appreciated my teaching enough to record a positive evaluation.  

Conferences were filed in aqua, a color I associated with the fashion concept of accent. A glance into these files triggered images of distant colleagues, some competitive or condescending, their coteries in which I felt inadequate. Riffling through the folder tabs organized by year, two decades of “cutting edge” research trends fanned out before me. 

But the authentic and humane turned up too.  Here and there a pre-digital photo dropped in the files reminded me of a heart-to-heart conversation with a female colleague. A shared wine or coffee with another struggling academic or a kindly senior scholar just taking a break from the panels. 

I made it through several rounds of file purging while still resident in my campus office.   Most of the folders, manila and colored, were emptied.  Their paper contents dumped into a bin by the shredder, folders stacked for reuse.   A few stragglers were boxed and hauled home to my basement office and there to rest until some moment of reflection would allow me to look at them again before sending them on to Republic’s domestic recycling.

   

Then late last February the weather gods intervened.  


During a week of record-breaking subzero cold, the pipes in my upstairs bathroom burst.  Gallons of water coursed downward through a ground floor bedroom and thence into my cozy basement office and onto a whole lot of paper.  Dragging plaster and shreds of old insulation, the water saturated a stack of file folders before it hit the linoleum. 

  

Future perusal? Too late now.  Color from file folders bled into the contents.   Red was the worst. I stacked soppy clumps of paper between Trader Joe bags and set them on the fireplace hearth to dry slowly, weighted down with bricks to press the swollen, crinkly sheaves flat. I note for the archaeologists that the computer prints outs were barely decipherable, while pages written in ballpoint pen remained legible.  

The stacks are still on the hearth.  It’s already June and time to tend to tomato plants and the zinnias. The next months will be spent outdoors and on the front porch.  November will be soon enough to return to the fireplace hearth and look at file folders.   Stiff and corrugated, I can twist them into kindling rolls and watch them burn in the first fireplace fires of the coming winter.   

Read more essays like this at East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/