Help! My Address Book is Obsolete
Or is it? December 19, 2023
Published in Crow’s Feet
3 min read
Dec 19, 2023
My desk
I was writing my Christmas cards this morning and addressing every envelope by hand, which is practically archaic. I know. I did try to keep my “contacts” on my computer and use the handy printed stick-on labels. That lasted about five minutes: those two divorced; they moved (again), or that one died.
It’s been coming for a long time, but every year: I think I’ll do it next year. Knowing more people are “on the other side” than living, I prefer to just say dead, and drop the euphemisms.
Maybe it’s time to buy a new address book. But how rational is that? These days half my contacts are on info cards on iCloud. It’s so simple to ask and do an “update” with the information. Except, here’s the thing, there’s no emotion connected to that act. Not a bit of what makes us human.
My book is fabric covered with grosgrain ribbon on one side; it has texture. The smell and feel of the pages, with the little alphabetized tabs poking out, beginning with the A tab, every single page has scratched-out addresses. On a lot of pages, I was lazy and scotch taped in the new address labels, not bothering to even write where it says name, address, zip code, and phone number. There are whole blocks of lines where I used “white out” and rewrote, especially as my children changed addresses dozens of times. Places where I penciled in children’s names after the birth of a new baby. The J tabs are permanently bent on my mother’s side of my family. Same with the T’s from my father’s side.
I believe we are here to maintain relationships. Even with the people who are only ‘Christmas card’ friends. I realize, in the sixth decade of my life, that those to whom we send and receive cards once a year, were once in our lives, were part of the fabric even when only a few singular threads remain. That is what makes the tapestry rich, colorful, and whole.
On my phone, I still cannot press delete on my favorites. What I wouldn’t give now, six months later, to tap my sister’s name. See her smiling face, with her arm around her black poodle, their heads leaning towards each other, and hear her voice. The message she practiced with me, so it’d sound just right.
Here’s the heart of it: when I turn the musty pages of my forty-year-old address book, see the names I wrote or scribbled, and the page with that coffee stain, memories conjured by seeing their letters, the street addresses, make me feel poignant, happy, sad, and alive.
It took me four years to draw a line through Marian’s name and longer for Aunt Liz. That’s how I am. Yesterday when I came to my sister’s address I paused. I will not cross it out. I see the street, see her in her front yard clipping roses, teaching her grandchildren how to build snowmen, and training her series of dogs. It’s in ink and it cannot be erased. I will never make an X mark through it.
It’s essential to keep in touch, to remain with those connections once a year, and to stay with the Christmas card list even as it changes. This life is fleeting, fading as fast as my penciled names and the bent corners of my address book.
