Paper Calendars

§   I don’t believe that I can be the only person who eschews technology to use a paper calendar, despite those convenient (and often so, so irritating!) reminders on one’s cell phone.  §

I use paper calendars. I do put the odd reminder (“Take the trash bin to the curb”) into my phone, but my paper calendar is sacred to all the genuinely important things in my life: not just the birthday, but the date by which I should mail the card or wrap the gift or call the person celebrating. The unpleasant reminders of dental visits. “Write to the twins.” “Touch up my roots.” “Babysit Morrigan”. “Shakespeare in the Park performance tonight”. Those events are entered the right way: with colorful stickers and bright marking pens and occasionally even glitter—entered, and then satisfyingly marked off.

As the close of each year approaches, I take down the paper calendar, now grown wrinkled and spotted, and, sifting through its pages, transfer vital notations—the birthdays and anniversaries and all the other important detritus of daily life–onto the pages of the pristine calendar that I will be using in the coming year.

I don’t believe that I can be the only person who eschews technology to do this, either, despite those convenient (and so, so irritating!) reminders on one’s cell phone. I know it can’t be just me using this old paper method, for the stores each fall are clogged with pretty paper calendars and desk pads and planners, while charity organizations (the same ones which so consistently dun me for donations) also mail free wall calendars by the dozens.

But I am choosy when it comes to selecting my annual calendar. I require spacious boxes in which to write notations—none of that square-cut-into-triangles nonsense squeezing in a date at the bottom of the page! I have one other very specific requirement: that the photos which decorate the pages of specific, special months always be ones I like.  Everyone using a paper calendar knows precisely what I mean, I’m sure: out of a dozen lovely photos, there will always be at least one, if not two, that just don’t appeal. I find it acceptable to look at a few such unappealing pictures throughout the year just so long as the scorned photos do not decorate the pages for my own month of birth, nor that of my daughter and granddaughter. Those pages must always contain pictures that I genuinely enjoy. I also appreciate seeing notations for phases of the moon, as I am moon-mad, loving to witness the changing lunar landscape. I’ve been known to page through the dates of the upcoming year making notations such as “Blue Moon”, “Super Moon”, “Lunar Eclipse”. One of my old calendars bore the rare notation “Transit of Venus”; others remind me of the annual Perseids meteor shower.

But these days when I hang up my new calendar, I always recall one year, one very sad year, when I waited desperately for New Year’s eve so that I could pull down and dispose of the very lovely calendar hanging on the side of my refrigerator.

My calendar that year had been a gift—and a constant reminder of a terrible day. A friend, Terry, diagnosed one awful afternoon with stage four lung cancer, had wakened the very next morning to the death of her sweet old giant of a dog. Having no family close by to help, she reached out to her friends.  After we ferried poor Sadie dog on her final journey to the vet’s office for cremation, two of us kept Terry occupied, first with brunch and then shopping.  It was then that we’d found some lovely paper calendars, and our friend bought one for each of us.

That same paper calendar was hanging in its usual spot on the side of my refrigerator when, just nine months later,  Terry died.

Each month that year as I turned the calendar to a new page, I’d been reminded of Terry’s diagnosis and loss and consistently failing health. Each month, I wished that I’d hung up any other calendar–even one I didn’t like–rather than this one which bore such sad associations.

Three months after Terry’s passing, I was finally able to consign that lovely, unhappy calendar to the trash bin. I hung up another, brilliant and new and totally free of links to distressing events.

I still use paper calendars, and plan to continue doing so. But I have learned an important lesson: I’ll never again put up a calendar chosen on a day with painful associations. And I will forever keep a spare calendar in abeyance, to be substituted if necessary, should the one I am using become connected with a terrible pain or loss or death or sadness.

I’ve never lived a year of my life without heartbreak occurring somewhere on the page; I don’t expect I ever will. But I hope to never again keep a reminder of sorrow hanging for months on the wall of my home.