The most important records are the ones I don’t have, the ones that live in memory and not in folders. But the ones in the folder mattered when it counted.
That will have to be enough.
And mostly, it is.
THE RELATIONSHIP WITH RUTH
I want to spend more time on my mother, because this story has made her into a document and she was a person.
Ruth Bennett was born in 1945 in a medium-sized Midwestern town, the second of three daughters. Her father worked for the county highway department. Her mother did what the phrase “stayed home” is supposed to cover, which is to say she ran a household with three children on one income and a set of expectations about women’s lives that Ruth absorbed and spent her entire adult life quietly negotiating around.
She went to the state university and got a degree in administrative management because it was practical and because it was what a woman who wanted to work could do without causing a lot of comment. She married my father, who was a pharmacist, and they had Daniel in 1980 and me in 1984, and then my father died in a car accident when I was eleven, which restructured everything.
Mom went back to work full-time. She worked for the county as a records clerk and then as a senior clerk and then as the records supervisor, a position she held for sixteen years before she retired. She was organized and efficient and she had opinions about the correct way to maintain a filing system that I have, without intending to, inherited.