This too

shall [never] pass . . .

When I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, I used to wonder why older people would cry when they recalled their past, when money was scarce and meals were mostly subsistence; when much was done with nothing, and nothing was all too familiar; when a couple of tangerines and a candy cane and a handful of walnuts were the extent of Christmas. I don’t wonder anymore.

A few weeks ago I was cleaning out the attic in the house where my family used to live, where my kids spent their childhoods and half their adolescence. It was the first house I ever built, a log house, high in the Smoky mountains; and the four of us, along with an assortment of little dogs, lived there for about 15 years. Along the way the attic became filled with former treasures: a doll house and its furniture; a tent, some life jackets, some third-hand skis; rejected tableware and mismatched glasses; sentimental clothing, plenty of old shoes, and papers, boxes of papers.

I had committed myself to taking on the task of clearing the attic without succumbing to the temptation to sift through every dusty item; that I would with impunity toss them out the opening where I had removed the gable end vent, and below which a hired dumpster sat ready to receive them. On that commitment I stumbled a little. To touch and feel the things you have not touched or felt in a decade or more is to suddenly have in your hands the magical keys to the past. What has happened in those years, but that to return to a memory beguiles the time?

In my zeal I tossed out a handmade dress my daughter had worn to a friend’s wedding when she was ten years old. That night my wife convinced me that I had been advised to save the dress, and that I had just forgotten my instructions. So the next morning I was back up in Black Camp Gap, in the Balsam mountains, rummaging through the dumpster. I found the dress, and I am certain that it was better for me that I did than it was for my daughter.

Aside from the pink gown, I remember bringing home only one other item from the old homestead. It is a cancelled check, one of many that fell out of the boxes of papers, the disposal of which was my solemn charge. The check I rescued from the ignominy of eternal death in the county dump just happened to have landed face up, and catch my attention. It was filled out as payment to the Allstate insurance company, in the amount of $112.88. Written in blue ink in my wife’s neat, exquisitely readable long hand, the check is dated April 12, 1989.

We had been living in N. Carolina for three-and-a-half years, by which time I might have been earning eight or nine dollars an hour, working in the trades and trying to learn. Shelda was tending our babies and selling Avon, but not for extra money. There was never extra money.

Did you think I might never come to the point? Well, here it is: When I picked up that check from the dusty attic floor, I was awestruck by what it represented, which was not the mere payment of an ancient bill, but a reminder, visceral and powerful, of the discipline and faithfulness with which my wife had always overseen our meager household finances. Like the old people before me, I had never been much aware of how dire things were. It was a time of beans and cornbread, and they tasted mighty fine; but if anything had gone awry; if I had been injured and unable to work, or if either Shelda or I had become ill I, I don’t know, I don’t know what would have become of us and our children.

But nothing tragic did happen, and we worked and we worked and we worked, until things did get better; and through it all, Shelda continued to dutifully write the checks and check the spending, and to make the ends meet when at times it seemed impossible. Those things she did, and in a faith so great, that, 30 years later, it causes me to weep. Such is the value of an old, cancelled check.