This may sound like a boast, and maybe it is, but I am very organized. I always have been. It's fine. I have always enjoyed label makers and when I occasionally look at the one large gray-silver plastic tub of memorabilia in the garage with its yearbooks, diplomas, death certificates of favorite grandmas, and expired driver's licenses, all organized in folders, in rows, by type, for ease of access, and I quiver with dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins and a possible mid-week orgasm, I have to remind my OCD self of my one cardinal rule about life management: "Do not organize the already organized."
And being an over-achiever, I succeed. Kind of.
What's next for a filing lunatic like me who has kept a one page diary entry of my daily drudgery and thrills every single day since February 16, 1973 (except for annus 1976 because I was feeling too cool)? When all the physical world is in order? Easy. I just go digital.
It's all getting digitized. Bit by bit. Going slowly. Since last year when I purchased a Plustek Photo Scanner for zippy pasta-machine type feeding of photos and docs and a Kobratech cell phone tripod for my iphone that I wrap around a horizontal mic-boom over my desk for large or quirky items to be photographed, well...you get the idea...I plowed through two shoeboxes so far from the 1960s and 1970s, a large box of crazy large format photos including those of my grandparents' wedding from 1938, and a box of my hair from my first haircut and, well, my baby shoe from my baptism, featured above.
I would love to say that when I look at this shoe I get some sort of warm feeling other than the joy of knowing that I still have it and that I can so easily take a nice picture of it and save it, but truly, I don't feel too much. I don't remember wearing it. I do remember that my little cousin Terry was dressed in some baptism outfit that I believe was borrowed from me. Or maybe from my sister. Or it was just the shared-family-baptism outfit. If I feel anything about little baptism shoes it would be this and it's not a feeling, it's just a memory: My cousin Terry's baptism was the first one I remember going to. I think I only went to a couple more, my nephew’s and my second cousin’s, many years later. I was the Godfather for both babies. But my family wasn’t really big into being Catholic. My parents were pretty much atheists and we were the family who gladly provided the secret recovery-basement to provide local girls a few hours of respite after their abortions.
I sometimes wonder, had I been aborted, if it would have mattered. Of course, the world would be a little less organized had I not been gestated and raised to put things into their categories. I guess I am very happy to be alive. But had I not made it out of the womb, well hell, someone else kind of like me would have picked up the slack.
This shoe, I photographed it today. I actually wish I had a strong feeling about it. But frankly, even though I am on the hunt here for some warmth or a cooing love for this shoe, I just feel a bit distant from it. Babies never seemed quite real to me. By the time I knew what a baby was, I was already not a baby and I had no memory of ever being one. I couldn't relate. I still don't. Not really. Babies are about as interesting as little bald, pink gerbils to me. These strange biological blobs waiting to take form.
My brother and I had Habitrails when we were in Junior High. They were in the basement. We each had a couple of gerbils in them. We did not know their sexes. One of my brother's gerbils gave birth to about eight little gerblits. My mother smartly warned my brother, "You better just let her nurse the babies and take out that other gerbil in there. I'm afraid he or she will eat the babies."
My brother followed her wise instructions. He put the other gerbil roommate into another cage, temporarily, to allow Momma Gerbil to raise her young. Everything was going well until the day he came home to find one of the babies was missing. Strange. The next day, another one. Then, there was blood kind of everywhere in the Habitrail. Momma gerbil had made quite a large meal of most of her babies. So my brother did the only thing he thought was right. He picked up the mother by the tail in a rage and he beat her to death with his fists. The few baby gerbils that remained, they grew up. They were cute and very energetic.
I don't believe mothers should eat their young. And if they do, it's probably best to make sure the behavior is stopped.
But back to this shoe. I'm still curious about it. It's kind of cute. It is hard to imagine any foot fitting in there. Especially my current size ten with the the lumpy fronts. Babies are so helpless. I was once helpless. My mother did not eat me. She cared for me. And she fed me. My earliest memories of her was her tying my shoes in the morning. Not this shoe, but bigger ones. And my brother's. And when she washed my hair real hard in the kitchen sink, like I was a cabbage, and it felt good.
We all were very helpless. So I guess this shoe makes me think/feel this: there is no way with a foot that small that you could do anything on your own. You need help. Even with the simple task of washing your hair.
I understand this, right? I try to be helpful to others. I'm not always good at it. Sometimes it makes me cranky. Sometimes I feel like it's fun. I think, really, I probably only recoil from aiding others because I am afraid of wasting time when I could be using that same time to organize things or to bang through a To-Do list. Which is nuts.
There is a saying, and I probably have it all wrong, and I am going to attribute it to Carl Sandburg, which could also be wrong: "The dead hold in their clenched fists only that which they have managed to give away."
Please let me know if you have the correct words and attribution for this saying. I have been googling for weeks trying to find it. People are trying to organize Google better. But the algorithm is very far from how I organize the shelves in my garage. Similar in that like goes with like. But overwhelming. And strangely, lacking labels that give you the date. But it is very similar to how our minds work. The associations. The tangents. The click-throughs.
"I got shoes, you got shoes, all God's children got shoes. When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes, gonna walk all over God's heaven, heaven, heaven--"
I loved being in the chorus when I was in grade school. I didn't care what we sang about. I just liked how it all sounded. I just wanted to feel good. In or out of my shoes.
doncummings.net
Bent But Not Broken, Heliotrope Books
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