The Address Book in the Drawer

On a slow Tuesday afternoon in the second week of July, at a small round oak kitchen table in a yellow-shingled cape at 14 Pearl Street in Damariscotta, Maine, a seventy-four-year-old retired Latin teacher named Louise Prescott — Weezie to everyone who has ever loved her — sits down with a mug of Bengal Spice, a fresh Uni-ball, and a small brown leather Coach address book that her mother Priscilla gave her at graduation in the June of 1972, and begins the small careful work she has been doing, on the second Tuesday of every month, for fifty-four years.

Outside, the fog has come off the Damariscotta River and is sitting quietly in the field behind the cottage. Inside, a yellow tabby named Cato — a rescue from the Lincoln County Animal Shelter, adopted in the November after Weezie's husband Ted passed — is asleep on the sunny half of the table, one paw across the A page.

Weezie lifts Cato. She turns to Ainsworth.

Beside the name of Rebecca Ainsworth — Colby '72, roommate for a year, godmother to Weezie's daughter Nell — Weezie has, on this Tuesday, a small clarifying task. Rebecca died the third week of April. Weezie has already crossed out the address in West Newbury and written, in the same small blue ink she has used for the deceased since 1979, a lowercase d. in the margin — and, beside it, the year: 2026.

She reads Rebecca's name again.

She holds it a beat.

She turns to B.

What is in the book

The book has been in a rotation of Weezie's front-hall drawer, her breakfast-nook shelf, and — since Ted's diagnosis in the fall of 2020 — the top of the maple desk in the study upstairs, since 1972. It contains three hundred and forty-two names, written in a small careful hand Weezie has been writing report-card comments in since her first year at Lincoln Academy in the fall of 1974.

Two hundred and eighteen are family. Sixty-one are friends. Forty-one are classmates from Colby. Twenty-two, in the margins beside the addresses, have a small lowercase d. — for the year Weezie learned they had died — and, in most of them, a small crossed-out address in the same blue Uni-ball.

The book is not a directory. It is a ledger. It is the plainest possible record of who is still on Weezie's list to write to at Christmas, who has stopped writing back, who has moved to a daughter's house in Charleston, and who has, in the plain quiet language of a small brown book, walked out of the room.

The book is the single most complete record, in the United States, of the current whereabouts, marital status, health, address, and — in a handful of cases marked DAF-2019 in a tiny blue notation Weezie keeps in the top corner — the giving vehicle of forty-one members of the Colby class of 1972.

The college has never asked to see it.

What the CRM has

Somewhere on the second floor of the alumni office in Waterville, the class-of-1972 records for these forty-one people, on the same Tuesday in July, read as follows.

Thirty-eight of them are marked active.

Three are marked deceased.

Nineteen of the thirty-eight active names are people Weezie has marked, in the small blue d. she has been writing for the deceased since 1979. Their obituaries have appeared, in the last fifteen years, in the Boston Globe, the Portland Press Herald, the Providence Journal, the Concord Monitor, the Rutland Herald, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and — for a classmate who moved to Carmel in 2011 — the Monterey County Weekly. Weezie cut the notices out. She keeps them, folded once, in a green accordion file in the breakfast nook, in a section labeled, in her own small blue script, the girls.

The college does not read the Boston Globe.

The college does not read the Monterey County Weekly.

The college's CRM, in the plainest reading, is nineteen deaths behind Weezie's brown book — behind a small, quiet, unpaid seventy-four-year-old Latin teacher in a yellow-shingled cape on Pearl Street, who has been keeping the ledger, in blue ink, at her kitchen table, on the second Tuesday of every month, for fifty-four years.

What Nell was told, at four-fifteen

On the same Tuesday, at four-fifteen, in the passenger seat of Nell's silver Subaru on the drive back from the vet in Newcastle, Weezie tells her daughter, in the small unassuming way Weezie tells all of the things that matter, that she has decided to leave the small brown book, at her death, to the college's alumni office.

She says it in the plain sentence of a Latin teacher.

She says: They will not know what to do with it. But I would like them to have it.

Nell drives for a mile without answering. Then she says, in the same plain sentence: Mom. They will not know what to do with it. But I would like them to have it.

They laugh. Cato, in the back, does not.

What Nan understood

Nan Fogarty understood two things about a small brown book that the CRM did not.

She understood that a widow of eighteen months does not experience a Tuesday afternoon in July as a Tuesday afternoon in July. She experiences it as one long slow accounting — of who is still on the Christmas list, of who has stopped writing back, of the small lowercase d. she has, in the last three years alone, written in the margin beside a name she has been writing in the same book, in the same hand, for fifty-four years.

Nan understood that the small brown book is not an eccentricity. It is the ground truth — kept, updated, at no charge to anyone, by a woman who has been paying more careful attention to Weezie's forty classmates than the entire second floor of the alumni office in Waterville has been paying, on any Tuesday afternoon, in the whole of the last fifteen years.

Nan understood, finally, that a college whose CRM is nineteen deaths behind a small brown book on Pearl Street has, in the plain unhurried reading, decided that the deaths are not the point — that the record of the living is the point — and that this is, in the plainest possible telling, exactly backward.

What Rōmy is doing about it

Rōmy does not open Weezie's drawer.

Rōmy does not sit at the round oak kitchen table with the mug of Bengal Spice and the fresh Uni-ball on the second Tuesday of every month. Rōmy is not the person Priscilla Marchand gave the small brown book to in the June of 1972, and it is not going to be the person Nell inherits it from in the year the small blue d. is written, at last, in some other kind hand, beside Weezie's own name.

What Rōmy does is smaller than that. It is the small quiet thing Weezie has been doing for the college, for free, since 1979. It is a reading.

Rōmy reads the Boston Globe. It reads the Portland Press Herald and the Providence Journal and the Concord Monitor and the Rutland Herald and — because a Colby class of 1972 has classmates in Carmel, and in Sarasota, and in a small mining town in southern Colorado — the Monterey County Weekly, and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and the small weekly in Silverton that prints two hundred and thirty copies and folds by hand.

It reads the paid notices and the free ones. It reads them on Tuesday and on Friday, exactly the way Nan read the Recorder at seven forty-two on the second floor over Federal Street Books, and it cross-references — quietly, in the corner of the associate director of advancement's screen at eight forty-two on a Wednesday morning — every name against the CRM.

On the Wednesday morning after Weezie's Tuesday, Rōmy puts, at the top of the associate director's list, a small quiet note:

Nineteen members of the class of 1972, currently marked active in the CRM, have paid obituaries in the local papers of the towns they died in, between 2011 and April of this year. Attached: the nineteen notices, the six survivor names in each, and the current mailing addresses on file — several of which are still receiving the fall appeal in the name of the deceased. Suggested: nineteen quiet updates to the CRM this afternoon, and — for the survivors whose addresses are on file — nineteen plain cream cards, in your own hand, this week, saying nothing at all except that you have, at last, noticed, and that you are so sorry it took this long.

The nineteen cards go out on Thursday.

The CRM, on the second Tuesday of July, is now current with Weezie's brown book.

The book is still in the drawer on Pearl Street. The book was never the point.

The reading was the point.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before anything else, do one small unfashionable thing.

Pull the class list for the class you graduated with — or, if you did not graduate from the institution you work for, the class of the alumnus whose file you most recently opened this morning. Pick any class, if it helps. The class of 1972 will do. So will 1968.

Take the list to the microfilm room of the town library — or, if that is what your town library has now, the digital archive — of the small local paper in the town where each classmate last lived.

Read the paid obituaries for the last five years, in the plain unhurried way Nan Fogarty read the Recorder at seven-forty on Tuesday mornings.

Every time you find a name from the list, put a small d. in blue ink beside it, and the year.

Bring the list back to the office.

Do not update the CRM this afternoon.

Instead, this Thursday, take a small stack of plain cream Crane's cards from the top drawer of the credenza.

Write, in your own hand, three sentences to the widow, or the daughter, or the son who is on the file as spouse or child beside each name.

Do not put a case for support in it.

Do not put a QR code in it.

Do not sign it with a title.

Say the person's name once.

Say that you have — at last, and with real feeling — noticed.

Say that you are so sorry it took this long.

Walk the stack, on your lunch break, to the post office on your corner.

The address book is in Weezie's drawer, on Pearl Street in Damariscotta.

She has been keeping it, for you, for fifty-four years.

Turn to it. ♡