ORGANIZATION

YOLANDA TORRISI ADLER

THE CHICAGO LITERARY SOCIETY

MAY 3, 2010

ORGANIZATION

For many years I ran a full time practice in a demanding profession, a family, a household, and some semblance of a social life. Every minute of the day was accounted for. It was difficult to find a few moments to do some reading, I mean the real thing, to feed your soul, not professionally related. Of course I photographed precious moments, trips and important occasions keep letters from special people in my life, but there was no time to put photographs into albums, file personal correspondence or paste mementos into scrapbooks. But I dreamed: “when things quiet down I will get this mess organized.” In the meanwhile I filled boxes with stuff, more or less at random. The boxes were kept out of sight in the crawl space. Finally, I found myself on my own and decided to move to an apartment. The selling point of the one I chose was that it had ample storage room on the same floor. I installed shelves and transported my boxes into my storage. Most of the boxes were sealed, few were labeled. Of course, as soon as I got settled I would look into them, sort and label.

However, I still did not get much discretionary time. Since I did not have to rush home to prepare and eat dinner with the family I could hang out at the hospital and mentor junior faculty on clinical research projects or simply go out with my colleagues and friends. A move to another teaching hospital entailed a more prestigious but also more demanding job. New connections and friendships meant more social commitments. Somehow, I had less discretionary time than before.

On top of that I was tempted by a program at the University of Chicago designed for people who felt that their profession, however fascinating and fulfilling, had limited their ability to indulge in other intellectual pursuits. I enrolled and found taking classes and writing papers on Greek culture and philosophy instead of tubular carcinomas a lot of fun. I got a Master in Liberal Arts, but it took all my discretionary time for several years. So, I carefully avoided the storage room, except to remove the tree ornaments at Christmas time.

But then I moved again. In my new apartment the storage room was less accessible but my study had a large walk in closet. I had a carpenter build file drawers and sturdy shelves. The boxes went on the shelves. Now they were handy and I could get to them easily. Fortunately the closet door kept them out of sight. But every time I had to get to a document in the files I had to look at the boxes, there, waiting.

Finally I retired. This was it. Now I would have lots of leisure time and could start sorting through my boxes. Retired friends warned me that they were busier than before and I would have problems finding time for projects. Of course, that was not going to happen to me. I’m a well organized person.

And then, I’m not sure how, time started to run fast ahead of me and I could not catch up. I now could attend interesting lectures and seminars geared to retired people. I found that I was expected to conduct docent tours at the Museum, help with projects at the Ethical Society, serve in several Boards, attend grandparents day for three grand daughters, meet friends for coffee in the morning and dinner in the evening, serve at a food kitchen, visit and be dinned by friends and reciprocate by cooking for them, etc., etc. I’ve been having a good time, but still no disposable time.

Finally I found a window of opportunity to get started on my project. I took down several large boxes filled with slides. Remember? They were photographs on small transparencies that had to be projected on a screen. You avoided dinner invitations from friends who had recently returned from a trip because you knew that it included long sessions viewing their slides, interrupted by the darn things getting stuck in the projector, forcing intervals during which all the males present contributed their opinions to correct the problem. The women sat by quietly, their contribution would not have been welcomed. Of course, you counterattacked by shooting away in your trips and returning the courtesy. Basking in those not so fond memories I removed multiple carousels from boxes filled with thousands of the darn slides.

I had a table top projector I used to rehearse professional lectures in the olden times, before power point. It projected the slides to a small built in screen. I started on a carousel with 90 photos and looked at the miniatures of a trip I had long forgotten. Unfortunately, after a couple dozen slides the light bulb blew up. I removed it and visited several electric appliances stores. Puzzled young men looked at it, asked what it was for, suppressed a smirk and politely informed me that no one uses a slide projector any longer and they did not carry that bulb. Obviously they considered me a quaint remnant of an archaic civilization.

Fortunately, apparently I am not the only dinosaur left and modern technology came to my rescue. I found the bulb in the internet. Several days later it arrived and I could resume my project. There were hundreds of slides taken during a single trip to Europe. They included multiple views of every public building in London, extensive documentation of the changing of the Queen’s guard, the activities of the pigeons in Hyde Park, and any other stone or event we found exotic. The same for Paris, Rome and the rest of the Grand Tour.

I decided that if I ever get the urge to remember what the great wall of China looks like, they have some beautiful travel books at the book stores. I kept the images that included members of the family or some unusual event and dumped the rest in a large garbage can next to my chair. Over the next week I filled the discard can and was left with 363 images deemed worthy of being kept for posterity. I contacted the Hospital photographer who fortunately had kept the device used to transfer slides to CD during the transition to power point. He agreed to do the job for a very reasonable price. I am now the proud owner of seven CDs carefully labeled, waiting for me to print the images and mount them in an album. In the meanwhile they take almost no space, so there is no hurry. I’ll get around to it some day.

After my marathon with the slides there was no significant change in the closet: it is still filled with boxes. I took out one that was unlabeled and found it contained letters. Another quaint old fashioned concept. Remember? You wrote in paper, put it in an envelope, added a stamp and mailed them. They were essential if you wished to keep in touch during what my grand daughters call the olden times. International phone calls involved an appointment with the operator and after several hours you obtained a connection that included mostly loud static. Ninety percent of very expensive time was used screaming: can you hear me? And: what? Letters were precious, the way to keep in touch. And you kept family letters.

Nowadays you dial from almost any corner of the world. Sometimes I still get a feeling of wonder that I can call Chicago on my cell phone from Tunisia and hold a conversation as easily as if I was next door. Or we e-mail. When the recipient is through reading he or she pushes delete and the letter disappears in cyberspace. In contrast when my parents died I found all the letters I wrote when I came to the States. And I had kept the ones they wrote to me. They are now in my closet.

So I started going through the letters. Unfortunately they had been tossed in the boxes in no particular order and many were slightly wrinkled and fragile. It seemed prudent to put them in plastic sheaths and transfer them to a binder, but after several hours I was less then halfway through. The real challenge was that I could not help reading some fragments and the memories they awoke were emotionally challenging. So I postponed the letter project, returned the box and the binder to the shelves. The next time I went to the closet I looked for something else.

I pulled another box at random and opened it. It held an eclectic mix of old photographs. Somehow I found myself holding a snapshot of my father. It captured a familiar expression of his: a closed lip smile barely perceptive, but a more obvious one throwing green sparks from his eyes. Like a sly and naughty child. And memory flooded over me.

He was in his mid eighties and taking care of my mother who by then had advanced Alzheimer’s. He would not let us put her in a nursing home, saying she was his wife and he would not send her to strangers. He had trouble reading, his main entertainment before his eyesight failed. So he sat with my vegetating mother in two arm chairs in the living room, watching TV for the better part of the day. During a visit I realized the furniture was old and drab, the chairs sagged and the TV was small, old and had a poor picture. I proposed that we go shopping for replacements but he dismissed the idea saying there was nothing wrong with the furniture or the TV. I knew better than to argue.

A few years before he had put me in charge of managing his assets so I simply went to a neighborhood furniture store, selected a new sofa, two arm chairs with foot stools, modest but new and serviceable, and the best and the largest TV set available. I paid cash and explained the situation to the owner. Like most Argentineans he was familiar with cranky old Sicilians. We planned our strategy.

Next day, at the time when my father was feeding lunch to my helpless mother, I opened the door to the delivery people. Two sturdy men came in, moved the sofa out and as soon as they reached the hallway two others brought in the new sofa. The process was repeated with the chairs and the TV set. I stood at the entrance fending my father’s protestations. The whole operation was carried out in less than twenty minutes and as seamlessly as a well planned commando raid. The men had the easy job. They took one look at my father and made a quick exit leaving me alone to face the music. Father was scolding at the new furniture.

“How much money did you spend?”

“It doesn’t matter, it’s done.”

“Did you use my money?”

“Of course.”

“You are wasting my money!”

“Father, what are you saving it for?”

There was a moment of silence and then he turned to me with the same closed lip smile and sparks in his eyes the photograph I was holding had captured.

“For my old age, he said.”

And we laughed in each other arms.

I took the photo, closed the box, returned it to the shelf walked out and closed the closet door. I put the photo in a frame. I look at it often. And continue to enjoy my busy life. I will get organized, sometime. When I am old.