Clipped Together

Filing through mom’s files I observe a single file thread: All the articles, stories, notes, and poems are held together by paper clips.

I started the weekend with six boxes of Mom's files, including a long and very sturdy one I forgot was buried beneath a wooden box lined with green felt that my Gran’pa Stern made for her. Sunday night finds me with three heavy boxes left to sort.

For the most part, I’m relegating to the recycle-bin, all the financial planning pages, newspaper and magazine articles, myriad class notes - most of which are in her studied stenographer’s short hand, (who can read that?), and her completion certificates from those classes, including her studies in community building, hospice care, literacy for children, Los Angeles Children’s Hospital volunteer orientation, and other equal indicators of her altruistic tendencies from age seventy on. The papers go, if not to recycling, then to stacks labeled for other family members. But, I save the clips.

The pile of them is deepening.

I’ve kept letters from my father to my mom, a cryptic list of her “alliances”, AKA lovers, and copies of cards she made for friends and family members - as if to say, “Hey! I’m proud of what I done, so I’m keepin’ a copy!” (only her way of saying that would have been much more erudite and grammatically correct). I don’t know why I keep the clips. Nor why I’ve removed the cutely curled pieces of shiny (some are rusty) metal bits that have held the papers together for more than 20, 30, 40 and, in some cases, 50 to 60 years!

Why save paper clips? 

Perhaps it’s magical thinking: that by keeping paper clips, my connection with mom will also stay together. What is the tensile strength of love? 

Probably stronger than metal. 

Metal clips DO recycle, don’t they. Perhaps it’s time to put ‘em in the blue bin... so this house won’t turn into a clip joint.

She was a remarkable woman. 

I’m privileged to be 

Barbara Freeman Stern Maxwell Kovner’s daughter.