What is in a piece of paper?

I am reading a Paul Tillich book, bought used from Red Letter Books in Boulder, CO.  Toward the back I found this blue slip of paper. It is a dental appointment reminder, the kind that is now just mailed because most of us don’t want to be reminded and will toss the slip of paper into the trash on the way out of the office. But not this patient. She kept hers and must have used it as a bookmark.

I try to imagine her story. Who is she? Did she ever make her appointment on that day in September? What year was it? How old was she? If her dentist recommends cleanings every 6-8 months, then she got this notice during the early days of Spring. OR maybe she was coming back later in the week for a root canal? Did she drive one of those floating boats of a late 70’s sedan with Devil’s Food red fabric interior, soaked with 30 years of Dunkin Doughnuts coffee and the lingering scent of cigarettes from when her husband smoked; the paint faded by sun, by time and it only has 87,000 miles?

One piece of paper can set off a slew of storytelling manufactured out of nothing more than a running imagination. A little piece of culture on a 3×4 note, left in a book.

What happens, though, in our information free-for-all when I can do the kind of research on this single piece of paper that used to be left to the likes of rotary-dial journalists, the Woodwards and Bernsteins of old? Does it help the story? Does the story become more news-like and less a true fiction?

After I Googled the dentists’ name at the top of the slip, I found that he is based in Rockford, Il. That led me to search the name on the slip of paper. Based on the obituary that showed up, the woman – who at one point had a dental appointment scheduled for 4:30pm on September 23 of some year – died at 77 on May 10, 2006.

She “graduated from Edgewood High School in 1946 and then St. Anthony College of Nursing in Rockford, Ill. in 1949… worked as a registered nurse at the V.A. Hospital and Oscar Mayer. Always concerned about the welfare of family, friends and strangers, Ruth was a dedicated volunteer who made endless meatloaves for those in need. Ruth taught her children to never shy away from a challenge, was a strong advocate for education and was very proud of the professional achievements of her three daughters and two sons.”(via Madison.com)

How does this change the story? What happens when an imagined entity now has flesh and blood and lived what looks like a good, noble life in a real location?

Ruth’s real life was likely filled with all kinds of rich drama and details that make the best of our fiction nothing more than leaves on the wind. And it may be that there was nothing extraordinary about Ruth’s life, but I am guessing she had some stories die with her – all those years as a nurse taking care of injured veterans some had to have confided moments of their most fear-filled moments.  Let’s not overlook that Ruth was born just a year before the Great Depression came crawling across the country like a plague of locusts. What did the little girl Ruth think of all the poverty and hardship in her first 10 years of life? Was this the formative time that would later lead to her to teach her children “never to shy away from a challenge?” Where was she when the news came about Pearl Harbor a few years later, a teenager in the Midwest soon to watch boys go off to war and never return? Did this inspire her to go to nursing school and take care of another war’s vets? Was it her first child that changed her from a nurse to a stay-at-home mom (before we even knew we needed that term of distinction)? Was it an empty nest that led to her work at Oscar Mayer?

She had known sorrow. One does not lose two brothers and not taste the sourness of grief. She had known joy. All those grandchildren, regardless of whatever untold tensions might have lay dormant between her and her sons or daughters, had to light up her day when they came to visit.

There is a whole life in a misplaced slip of paper, left in the back pages of a used book.

As people read more and more books downloaded from some server in some unknown location – words becoming zeros and ones and a bit less tangible – are we going to lose the surprises that can be found among the analog world of a stale used bookstore?

That said, if it wasn’t for the ease with which I accessed an enormous amount of information in the digital realm, that slip of paper may not have had carried the significance it does now.

To propose that all things digital are the bane of our creativity would be a true hypocrisy on my part. I would never have taken the time to research a slip of paper in a book, nor find such a depth of information without the ease of a Google search. But then, to live in a world where there are no more slips of paper to be absently left in a book is to live without those pleasant mistakes that are catalysts to great storytelling.  Maybe that is why the stuff of culture makes for such a beautiful mess.