When you collect stuff because you are interested in history, you will find, as the years go by, that the term “gradual” can have an insidious connotation. Your here and there interactions with items is cumulative. It adds up. It gets stashed in a box and then you discover you have boxes. How did this happen? I think it is something like life: you’d think, “Oh, Heavens, this is going to take forever and I am going to be soooo bored” or “Gee, is this colonoscopy ever going to be over?” Then, bam, years, decades even, have passed.

I actually remember the first day of kindergarten; somehow 65 years have passed. But then I don’t think I’d really like to do kindergarten again. I was so clueless; I remember when we went to a basketball game at the school where my dad was teaching, the teen-aged daughters of the principal kept asking if I needed to go the restroom. I couldn’t understand why . . . I wasn’t tired.

But I’m talking actually stuff right now. I’m talking ONE small box that I started digging through. I came across an old checkbook – not mine, one from Lakeside Hospital in Kendallville. (That will teach me to not get caught up in the bidding at an estate auction.)

It’s from 1916 and similar to the checkbooks of the recent past with the stub for noting what the check was written for. Apparently, however, some people – and I guess it was important when the person was the hospital treasurer – would past the cancelled check back onto the stub. It didn’t get lost.

Ah, I see that although most of the checks I found were from 1916, this one was from 1917. They were doing the same thing I do, paying the fuel and light bill. I do it online now, though, and I pay more than $8.47.

Notice the date: June 6, 1917. Who knew that 27 years later, the Allies would be landing on the Normandy beaches? Actually, the U.S. wasn’t even in W.W.I yet and no one was wondering how they were going to keep them down on the farm after they’d seen Paree.