Card Stock

The tiny things we choose to remember can echo forward for decades.

MY PARENTS WERE both committed users of index cards — or just “3x5 cards,” as they called them. My father carried tiny reams of them around in his shirt pocket, blank and bound with rubberbands, and occasionally even elevated them to art forms. My mother tended to capture quotes on them and keep them in plastic file boxes as sort of an alternative-form commonplace book. When each died, I found sundry stacks of unused 3x5 cards in their drawers, boxes and supply closets. Blank canvases, awaiting tiny ideas.

This Monday, Oct. 2, would have been my mother’s 99th birthday. Several years ago, in excavating some of her file boxes at her request after she and my father moved out of their longtime home and into the first phase of their retirement-village decrepitude, I found sandwiched between some address cards this excerpt from a 1980 Reader’s Digest article. I had it framed.

I can see why it spoke to her — it is, in essence, a statement of one of her most core beliefs. And I’ll be honest: Thinking about this quote — and about my mother’s mindset in grabbing it out of the matter stream and memorializing it — informed me in my journey of the years that followed, when they both tumbled into severe dementia. The quote offered an organizing principle for the care and (sometimes) feeding of the people who used to tower over me but whom I came to watch over in sort of the same way.

I don’t know what the story was about; maybe I’ll decide to track it down one day. God knows there were enough Reader’s Digests around our house in those days. But the quote stands alone, worthy.

“What does a family do? It gathers around and supports — the strong who used to be weak repaying the weak who used to be strong.”

— Edward Ziegler, “Lucy, Lavender, and the Last Journey,” Reader’s Digest, June 1980