Deidre WoollardContrary to popular myth, rites of passage are not merely restricted to spinning the bottle at sweet sixteen parties and emptying it when you turn twenty-one. They can occur at any time, any age. And like baby’s first curse word or grandma’s last tooth, all are inevitable. Take, for instance, the rite of changing address books. This watershed event in a woman’s lifetime, usually coincides with a dramatic drop in heel height and an insidious increase in pants size, but for those not prone to procrastination or predisposed to obsessive compulsion, it can happen sooner. Either way, make no mistake— eventually the time is going to come when the old address book has got to go.

I’d been putting it off for decades, and without much consternation probably since I haven’t sent anyone a card in several years running. But this year, I decided, things were going to be different. No more hollow, e-mailed sentiments for me. No sir. This year, I was going to fill out my store bought cards the old fashioned way—in long hand, affixed with a real, live stamp, in an actual licked envelope. Which naturally meant pulling out the old address book.

As I flipped through the dog-eared, ink-smeared pages of the decades old, bent up, spiral bound book, I realized that, sadly, nearly half the people whose names were preserved were now either dead, divorced, and moved, with present whereabouts unknown. I noticed that one year, I’d actually gone so far as to “X” out a few of the mortally deceased and maritally defunct— an act which, at the time, didn’t seem as cold to me as it does now. But as I remember, I was simply being organized that particular year, lest I should forget those who have departed and accidently send them a greeting card.

I thumbed the pages, lingering over the names of old college friends I’d once sworn to party with until the end of time and who, over time, had slowly broken rank, only to be numbered among that unfortunate fraternity populated by the crossed out victims of life’s changing priorities. How I missed those people…but did I miss them enough to send them a card? Or was it too late to go back, too risky to waste a stamp on a potentially dead letter or worse yet, one that’s been cancelled and returned with no forwarding address, as if the addressee had joined the witness protection program and been erased from existence.

Pondering and wandering, I noticed a persistent unwillingness on my part to file married friends in their newly appropriated sections, opting instead to keep them alphabetized under their maiden names, with their married names noted in parenthesis— an unintentional act of foreshadowing in some cases, to be sure.

gigijinThe stragglers were sandwiched in between, mostly in the M's and B’s— loyal friends who’d stood the test of time, aging relatives who’d lived well past their primes. Local pizza parlors. Dependable plumbers. There was a number for my old piano tuner, a gentleman whose services had doubtless grown as obsolete as the hat he’d worn whenever he came calling with his tuning forks and wedges of felt. I remembered how he liked to play “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” whenever he finished with the tuning. I really liked that old guy. But his name was crossed out too. Must have been the year I bought the digital piano. Either that, or he’d long since tweaked his last string.

I was pleased to note that the O’s were well represented, a consequence, no doubt, of my having been brought up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. There was an entry in the T’s for a guy simply known to me as ‘Tickets Kenny.’ He was a smooth talker who used to hook me up for all the Dead concerts so that I never had to stand in line. His name was crossed out too, probably after Jerry died. Or had he taken that final, one-way trip.

A lone hoagie shop was scratched across the terrible emptiness of Z, but the J,U,V and X sections were still as bare as they’d been thirty years ago. I’d been saving those spaces for the plethora of yet- unknown friends with exotic names I'd fully expected to someday know well enough to record their addresses. I’m still waiting.

Then there was the disturbing smattering of mysterious strangers, names preserved, faces long forgotten. Where had I met these people? How had I known them? What shared experience had so moved me as to commit their names to paper and ink in a book I was to own for the next thirty years? But there is a type of amnesia that afflicts us all, aids us in filtering out those who no longer matter, leaving them to inhabit someone else’s book.

The new address book is much smaller, more modest. There are a few conspicuous omissions— namely my ex-husband. I toyed with the idea of adding him, but since I didn’t even have his full address, I wound up leaving the X section blank again, as usual. I’m leaving room nonetheless. I figure between now and when I become the latest cross out in somebody else’s address book, I still might meet an X or two.

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