The Giant File Cabinet of My History

The human brain is an interesting beast. It internally bares the scares of emotional wounds inflicted over an entire lifetime. It has to sort through the “keepers”, and the “trash”. It is a mental colander filtering the finite seconds of our lives into some tangible story that becomes “Who I Am”. Memories that are to be held in regard (either for their pain, or their pleasure) must be sorted and placed properly into the Giant File Cabinet of My History.

The Giant File Cabinet of My History is an unruly beast. Not some high-gloss IKEA creation, equal in both form and function (that could possibly pressure cook chicken if needed), but a big, grey, industrial-strength, fire-proof mother with a padlock only one person in the entire history of man will ever have the combination to. It is in this file cabinet that all of our hopes and fears, longings for the future and the past, and faith in whatever it is we believe resides. It is the place where all the thoughts we ever dare to think become tangible in a cartoon sense.

This past weekend, unknowingly at best, I was forced to open The Giant File Cabinet of My History and delve into some of the most deeply buried and tender memories I could recall in a file entitled “Innocence”. The Giant Filing Cabinet of My History houses many files by this point in my life. There’s “Love Lost”. “Forgotten Friends”, “Dreams That Had to Die”, just to name a few, but “Innocence” always knocks me back to reality.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the bar mitzvah of a close friend’s son, my “nephew” Julian. This rite of passage took place in the town of my birth, Ft. Wayne, IN. We arrived at the house too late to ride to the synagogue with the rest of the party, so we ended up driving across town to join them. It was on this journey I saw the place where my grandparent’s house once stood…the shopping center where my mother would take me to ride the penny mechanical horse…the tiny yellow house in which I lived as a toddler. It was like The Giant File Cabinet of My History had a very important folder into which I had to be thrust to remember that there was another person I was, and another place I came from.

I began to wonder, “What happened?” When did I incorrectly file away all I thought I could be at that age? When did I push the thin manila folder that held “Expectations of Life and Love” to a place I couldn’t reach? When did my Mom and Dad stop being “Mommy and Daddy”? Where has it all gone? What happened to that little red-headed girl who knew it all? Where had I filed her?

As we set through the service I found myself thinking about my own growth. Myself at age 13. The singing of the Hebrew over my thoughts sounded somehow reminiscent to the blues songs I have become so comfortable singing over the years. The cries of suffering, and the relief that can only come from some higher power. (It is all the same in music.) It was when Julian’s father wept in joy with the man his son was becoming that I felt the tears sting my face. (Every parent should be forced to stand in front of a room full of friends and God and tell them all how much they love their child.) I never had a destiny. I merely had a life. Maybe my cabinet had been filed just the way it was supposed to be…I will only know on the day it is finally locked forever.

Everyone should have a day in their life that can file in The Great File Cabinet of My History under “Progress”. I do not know where the time went that an ice cream cone and a wagon ride were replaced with dirty martinis and stick shift cars. I do not know if I have fulfilled that little girl’s destiny, but I still continue to try. I do not know if there is a file of the day I finally “became a woman” or a file that holds pictures of my parents glowing…ethereally proud of my accomplishments. All I know is that these files, one and all, make up the whole of all that is “Me”. Some of them hurt. Some of them heal. Some of them are questions that will never have the luxury of an answer. The Great File Cabinet of My History is mine. All mine….and it is the only thing you can take with you when you go…Better do your damn best to try to produce the best files you possibly can.