Keeping the Card File

The card file lives in four oak drawers behind my desk, and it is a filing system. A grocer keeps a ledger. I keep cards.

They are three by five, unruled, ordered by the box from a stationer on Gallatin Road, twelve dollars and fifty cents for two hundred. The unruled part matters. A ruled card asks you to put everything on a line, and half of what I record will not sit on one. A sister in Hendersonville who has not spoken to the family since 1972. A first marriage nobody brings up. A stepson who calls on birthdays and not otherwise. Those go in the margin, written at an angle, and anyone else opening my drawer would call it a mess. It is a map of who will be standing in the room.

Green ink while a card is active. Black when it is filed. Nothing gets erased. If a fact changes I strike it once, thin, so the old fact stays legible, and I put the new one underneath with the date I learned it. A struck line is information. A family will tell you in June that there are three grandchildren and in August that there are two, and the difference is never a clerical error. It is usually a falling-out, and I have to know about it. I do not always print it.

When the phone rings

Most of my calls come from families, and they come around two in the afternoon, which is when people finally sit down. I keep a pad to the left of the phone and I do not write on the card during the call. I made that rule for myself in my second year, after I took a middle name down wrong, wrote it straight onto the card in my own confident hand, and then believed my card instead of the daughter.

What I ask for, in order: the full name as it should appear, the spelling of it, the town, the survivors by first name and relation. Then I read the whole survived-by list back. Twice. People do not correct you on the first pass. They are listening to the shape of it, hearing their own family said out loud in the order it will be printed, and the missing name only surfaces the second time through. Nobody has ever thanked me for reading it once.

In lieu of flowers is the other line to get right. The family will see that sentence for years, on a clipping folded into a Bible or left in a kitchen drawer, and there is a real difference between the food bank on Dickerson and the church pantry two blocks off it. One of them is the one they meant.

Corrections

We run them the following week, in the same column, same type, no smaller. A correction set in smaller type is an apology you are making to yourself.

Mine are mostly spellings. Bruening for Breuning. Pardue for Perdue. Once in a while a survivor appears who was in fact preceded, and that one I telephone about before it prints, because a family reads it as carelessness and they are right.

I do get mail from subjects. It is a category with its own folder and its own handling, and the handling is this: acknowledge the letter, thank the writer for reading closely, confirm what we have on file, and ask whether he would like anything added while we have the correspondence open. Most people do. A man will write in hot about the dates and then spend his second paragraph telling me his mother's maiden name was Pardue, two syllables, and that she kept bees behind the house on Ellington and sold the honey out of a cooler. That goes on the card. Green ink. His letter goes in the folder with the rest.

Hollow-mere Memorial underwrites this column and has asked me to note that they handle pre-need arrangements, which they do, competently, with a payment plan and no pressure in the room. I will add only this, having met a great many of their clients: the people who arrange in advance are not the gloomy ones. They are the ones who pay a bill before it comes due. They sit down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, they get the spellings right, and then they go on about their week considerably lighter than the rest of us.

I take my lunch at noon.