The Ledger

Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind...

I can remember, growing up, watching my mother whenever she went to pay the bills. She had this black ledger she always kept track of everything...and I mean everything...in. Bills. Important dates. Events. You name it, it was in that ledger.

Seems as long as she was running the house (and we're talking a long time here, folks) she'd been keeping track of the bills in those ledgers. There'd been many over the years...seems she could keep roughly a decade's worth of history in each one.

Over the past couple weeks, I've had to go through some of her old papers, old bills, looking for records. It's amazing, the things she's kept over the years. I've found bills from 1960...46 years old...stored in her room.

And some of those ledgers that I've looked through...some of the things she's recorded over the years...amazing. She's got an entry from 1962 for $2 from lunch she had at Eat 'N Park one day. To you and I, these things, might seem trivial. To her, it was noteworthy, not only because it was a lunch out, but because it was money spent from the coffers that needed to be recorded.

A few months ago, because of failing eyesight, she had me start recording the bills in the ledger. She'd still write notes for special events that might've happened...a baseball game we went to, Mother's Day gifts, things like that.

Rather ironic...and rather fittingly...I've started entering the bills in the last page of this ledger.

She started this current book in Septemer, 1996. I took a look through it tonight, remembering things I'd forgotten and some I only wish I could forget. A vacation here. A concert there. Two Towers that fell. Births, deaths and everything in between.

She'd recorded them all.

Now it's my turn.

It's my turn to keep track of things.
It's my turn to note the bills.
It's my turn to record history.

Yesterday, when I went shopping, I picked up the next ledger, the next book to record the monthly bills and important events. The next in a chain that stretches across five decades at the very least. For as much of a geek that I may be, for as much as I love my electronics and computers and all the gadgets I can get my hands on, the bills will be kept in those ledgers.

It's just the right thing to do.