I can't quite remember when my obsession with calendars began, but I think that it just slowly grew more and more intense over the years. My mother always did most of the Christmas shopping, but my father bought my brother and I a calendar each year. My brother usually got a car calendar with pictures of mustangs, hot-rods, or classic cars. I would get a ballet calendar with pictures of dancers with pointed toes and lithe frames. I think it was in high school when I started buying my own calendars, in addition to the one my father got for me. I'd get a page-a-day desk calendar and a wall one too.
My senior year of high school I had plans to become a professional ballet dancer, or at least go off to college to major in dance. I spent school vacation and weekends flying or driving to audition at colleges in the area, but far enough away from my parents that I wouldn't be obligated to visit on a regular basis. I fell in love with the first college, but was rejected after just the first phase of auditions. I remember staring at the posting of names on the audition room door, hoping that if I looked long enough I would see my name listed. I was disappointed that I hadn't gotten to perform my solo featuring a specially spliced cassette tape of music including a clip from Pantera's "Shedding Skin." Something tells me that even if I made it to the third phase of auditions the guitar rifts of my favorite band would have caused the up-tight balletomanes to cross my name from the list.
I was accepted to the second college that I auditioned for, but thought another uncertain year at home with my parents would be far less traumatic than attending the college in Connecticut. The dance campus was a shuttle bus ride away through a dark and seedy area of town. The graduating dancers performed for us while we were there and I thought I could have been the soloist in the performance even though I was just a senior in high school.
The neighborhood surrounding the third college I auditioned at had a strip club, pawn shop, or liquor store on every corner. The campus itself was beautiful though, and I figured I just wouldn't venture outside very often. I learned later that with late auditions, most spots were already filled. Even though I was confident in my performance, I wasn't offered acceptance to the dance program. I was admitted for academics and offered a scholarship, but by the time I received the acceptance letter I had already fallen in love and started dating the man who would later become my husband, so I wasn't about to up and move out of the state. I decided to take a year off and figure out where my life was headed.
I was still working at the fast food restaurant I'd been at since I was 15, but I was only working one or two days a week and wanted something more consistent to pass the time while my boyfriend was in high school (that is, when he wasn't skipping.) I was hired as seasonal help at a major bookstore in Boston and was allowed to continue working after the new year. I would be there for four years before moving to Georgia.
My second holiday season at the bookstore, I offered to control the calendar setting up and sales since my obsession with paper dates was growing each year. The calendars were one of few things in the store that didn't have a particular order of organization mandated by the corporate office. The person who had done the job previously just placed the calendars anywhere, as quickly as possible. I created patterns by subjects, colors, and sizes. I would lose hours stacking box calendars in perfect pyramids on giant wooden display tables or slipping wall calendars in wire spinning racks.
The day after Christmas all calendars would be marked down 50% off. After New Year's the remaining would go to 75% off, then by a certain date in January they had to be taken off the sales floor. Books that don't sell are boxed and shipped back to the publishing company after their shelf lives have expired. Calendars, however, are just scanned into a computer system and discarded. Sometimes we'd ship the empty boxes for page-a-days back, but otherwise they ended up in the dumpster. I suggested to a manager once that we should try to recycle them or at least put them in a "free" box outside. I was told that that wasn't an option and instructed to continue filling up trash bags with the perfectly good calendars most people pay close to $15 for. In an attempt to save some trees (or feed my addiction) I brought home an assortment of daily desk calendars on crafts, photography, vocabulary, and European languages.
In January of 2007, my fiance was due to return from Iraq in six weeks, and we had planned our wedding for March. I would be graduating in June and thought I would be moving in with him in Germany. I knew I wasn't going to want to take 10 calendars in my carry-on-bag over seas, so I made my choices carefully with my husband's interests in mind. I took the Celtic Mandala and Ireland calendars pictured above and also The Joy of Cooking page a day calendar, anticipating I'd fill my expected role as wife and cook dinner every night. The back of the box displayed a page on properly quartering and tying a whole chicken-- I thought that would be something I should learn and only imagined all the other culinary arts I wasn't aware of that this box of paper would offer. I picked up one for Cookies also.
Although we did get married in March, my husband was transferred from a base in Germany to one in Georgia. Still, the calendars came with us and hung on the kitchen wall or stood on my bedside table. I ended up buying several more when we first moved so that I could rip out the pictures and decorate our white walls with Van Gogh paintings and flower photos.
Now that 24 days has turned into 45 and the immediate clutter around me has been cleared, I have been forced to go looking for items. I have a large black footlocker in the base of my closet where I keep important papers and where I shoved many items that my husband had given to me. Even though I pulled out some of them a few weeks ago before my yard sale, I hadn't completely inspected the black bin. As I was going through it more closely today, I discovered these three calendars from 2007 and 2008. I often keep old calendars to use the pictures as posters, but know that I no longer care to have photographs for a heritage I don't relate to taped to my walls. Maybe I saved these and not the ones from other years because of what a transformational year 2007 was. It's funny that five years later, the past year has also been one of change, but this time I'm moving in the opposite direction. The changes I have made over the past year have been mostly internal-- shifts in perspective, understanding, attitude, to which the outward shift of my separation served as the impetus. Maybe in five years I'll have another transformation. At least I know I won't be cleaning out the pointless pages of the past the way that I am now.
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