Because a Thousand Trillion Synapses Aren’t Enough: The Card File

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”—Vincent Van Gogh

“Skip likes the quare thing that snaps the routine—in one appendix, a sprouting bean.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—6/20/11—I began filing in self-defense. Mother accused me of forgetting to send her a birthday present, but my wife and I knew we had sent her something—we just couldn’t recall what it was. Suddenly, we both felt like the farmer standing in the pasture with a rope in his hand, not sure if he’d found the rope or lost the cow.

A few years earlier, I’d started filing classroom materials in manila folders after a professor of mine at Auburn said he summarized the contents of every academic article he read on one or more three-by-five cards. When I went to see him, I noticed that in a corner of his office was a small card catalogue. I was tempted to break in just to see how he had it all organized, for it was one thing to file something but another to find it. A decade passed before I understood the virtue of the card system.

My dealings with Mother were simplified once I started the “Mother” file folder. A record of anything she or Dad sent or I sent them went into the file. Showing the preliminary symptoms of dementia a few years later, she claimed she had bought us a car which I knew was incorrect, but Dad’s memory was merely porous, unlike Mother’s, which was porous and creative. When I got home, I checked my files, found the details of the VW’s purchase, and forwarded them to Mother. Dad had bought the car in Germany, but we repaid him in full when we took ownership in Savannah. Case closed.

By 1980, my file folders were so thick, it sometimes took me an hour or more to find the item I needed, so I started keeping a supplementary file on index cards like my former professor. I built a wooden box about six inches long thinking I’d never fill that up. Soon the small box gave way to three, 18-inch-long boxes. They were chockfull in two years.

One day I said something to the departmental secretary about the “critical mess” my cards had reached, and she suggested checking the campus warehouse where surplus furniture was stored until it could be auctioned. This was about the time that the school administration was beginning to phase out those perforated IBM cards which users were instructed not to “fold, spindle, or mutilate.” In the warehouse, I found a four-foot-tall steel cabinet for three-by-seven-and-a-quarter-inch cards, convinced the manager I needed it for “research,” and wrestled it into the trunk.

Today I have five steel cabinets, the combined contents of which come as close as any insentient thing ever has to dominating my life. My cars, bicycles, house, and power tools don’t even come close. I’ve joked with friends about an intervention but, if they followed through, I would be as forlorn as one of the recipients of a prefrontal lobotomy. The file is frankly an extension of my brain. My wife is a third lobe, but that’s another story.

A born collector, this taxophile has gone through life with a plankton net, as Annie Dillard once suggested. If the house caught fire and I were home alone, I wouldn’t save the picture albums, passports, or bank files; I’d save my card file. Without it, my memory falls somewhere between that of a goldfish (three seconds) and a squirrel (two weeks). In fact, the image of me digging in a file like a squirrel hunting an acorn buried six months earlier is another thing that prompted me to start collecting in a more systematic way.

Though retired from full-time teaching for four years now, I still spend an hour or two a day maintaining the file. As I read, I mark passages for saving. When my wife is finished with the same piece (I’m describing the ideal here), I usually cut out the statistic, quotation, poem, picture, or cartoon, and then drop it in a box by my desk. When I have 20 or 30 items, I glue them to a card, label it, and file it safely away. If the item is too large for a card, it goes into a file folder.

Early on in the process with the inspiration of a topical quotation dictionary to thank, I appropriated the system of ordering things by broad idea—automobiles, energy, fundamentalism, democracy, homosexuality, comedy—and so forth. My index now has 2,200 categories (from Abbreviations, Abortion, and Absolutes to Zodiac, Zoning, and Zoos) while the file itself contains somewhere above 70,000 cards on which I’ve glued or written about 400,000 items.

When I get ready to write anything from my next column to a condolence letter, I pull out the cards pertinent to my themes, stir the pot, and see what bubbles to the surface. The result is usually something very different from what I originally conceived. As Linus Pauling, winner of Nobel Prizes for Chemistry and Peace, once observed, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” The cards insure that I review the accepted wisdom before bombinating in a quantum void.

Perhaps a hypothetical example will help to explain the value of what is often called a “commonplace book” except that, in my case, “the book” is kept on file cards for ease of shuffling and free association.

For a couple of years, nothing has tickled our three grandsons more than a fart joke, so should I write a story or essay for their amusement, I would open the “F” drawer, pull out the “Fart” cards (there are 48 of them), read through about 250 items, and start writing.

Among the items I’ve saved are: an ad for Walter the Farting Dog (2007) by William Kotzwinkle; a reminder that in team cycling, one rider “breaks wind” for the others; the story of Babe Ruth being asked by a society matron if he’d care for some asparagus. Said Ruth, “No, thanks, it makes my farts smell funny”; a reminder that mooning the soccer referee is a “fragrant foul”; another ad, this one for the Flatulence Cushion with an activated-charcoal filter; a note that our son wrote his mother on her birthday saying, “I hope you like this card . . . . Someone farted in the Hallmark Shop, and I could only hold my breath long enough to grab this one”; a newspaper clipping about a South African flight with 300 passengers sharing a compartment with 72 pigs, which had to turn back when the animals’ exhaust set off the smoke alarm; the clever definition of “flatulence” as “the emergency vehicle that picks you up after being struck by a steamroller”; and, finally, my own observation that farting with impunity is the only good thing about mowing the lawn.

With a repository such as this, my writing should be as relaxed as passing wind in the shower, and it usually is.

Incidentally, as I was reviewing the fart cards, I found “Poot” scrawled on one card in the handwriting of our youngest grandson. I’d been outed by a ten-year-old.

If neither of our children wants the file after I’m gone, I’ve informed Clemson University’s special collections librarian that the school may have it. It’s a consolation to me that other writers may one day use it to break out of a slump. Like the mulched leaves I dig into my vegetable garden, I hope to be fertile in decay. Somewhere on the exterior of the first file cabinet, I’d like the following words to be placed, “It’s OK. It was all so beautiful. Whenever you read this, I will be there.”

I found that anonymous quotation in the “Grief” cards.