I miss my routine. On Fridays for the past lots of years I should have a dance class. For a long time it was floor barre. This year and last it’s been flamenco. Friday evening at 5pm right after work is a lovely time for a dance class – especially flamenco where I can stomp my week away. (Also floor barre, which was a nice stretch for the end of the week.)

Precious Thing.

The last couple times I visited my parents house I cleared out a bunch of my old junk and brought it home with me for consideration of what to do with it next. One of the things is this little metal file box,

The stickers on it are garbage. The top one is a “not to be removed until delivered to customer” label that I think I peeled off the bottom of the folding chair I used to use at my desk. The blue Pet Shop Boys sticker was on the front of a CD. “Hunting Humans” was a show at the Duncan Fringe Festival in 1993 or 1994. Not pictured is a price label from my copy of “The Cunning Man” by Robertson Davies (a fave in my later teenage years), purchased at Book Warehouse.

The box is meant to hold 3×5 inch index cards. And so it does!

Between approximately 1991 through 2002ish I wrote the details of every book I read on an index card and kept it here. There used to be tabs of the alphabet, sorting the cards by author. And, admittedly, there were two boxes for a while, divided at the Mc/Macs because that’s a lot of card and they’re hard to flip through when they’re packed in so tight like that. And also for some reason I had two boxes- the other one was also metal but had a red plaid pattern and has currently been appropriated to collect money from the egg sales dad has set up next to the garage. I’m not sure where the alphabet cards got to.

As pictured above you can see “The Blind Assassin” by Margaret Atwood. I would include the publication date, as well, because that seems like something that should be included on an index card. On the right hand side is the genre, with a little note below noting that it’s “mine” – I own a copy. The rest of the card might sometimes be dedicated to a copy of the blurb on the back of the book, copied verbatim, occasionally edited for space, as a reminder of what the book is about. Sometimes there would be a note somewhere saying that I really liked it. I would write the date I finished each book on the back of the card– on some cards there are multiple dates. I finished “The Blind Assassin” on July 25, 2003 (although I don’t think that’s the first time I read it, because I bought it when it was published in 2000.)

It would have been super cute now if I could tell you exactly when I read “The Cunning Man” that I mentioned buying before, however, there’s no card for that so I wasn’t consistent. I can tell you that the first time I finished reading “Pride and Prejudice” was February 4, 1994. I always knew this datakeeping would come in handy some day.