It Must Be Somewhere

“Dad, wake me up at eight.  I have this volunteer thing at school tomorrow.” I dutifully climbed the stairs and delivered the awful news: “time to get up.” She came down later and said it was already too late. ”Too late?”  “Yeah I think they left already.”  “You think?”  Don’t give up.  You need the fighting spirit that doesn’t give up,” I suggested, as if I were George C. Scott.  I gave her a look of notable disbelief.

Much relieved to receive the news a few moments later:  “They haven’t left yet.”  “Ahh. Ok.  Shall we go catch them then?”  We did.  An hour later the younger one rang the bell.  She’d returned from a sleep over somewhere else in the compound.  She’d begun texting me at 5:00AM: “Hi.”  Apparently she had spent the slumber party sleeping on the floor.  She had a bit to eat and promptly went back to sleep. 

I worked.  I worked a long time on one document.  And then the document I was working on crashed.  Happens.  I reopened but it hadn’t auto saved.  Hours of work was now gone.  My own fault.  An older version of powerpoint, an older operating system, I knew why this disaster that used to happen all the time in the early days of computing but hasn’t been a major issue for years, befell me.  I kept looking in vain for the “recovered” file.  It must be somewhere. It wasn’t.

Who is the British historian who finished a history of something only to have his house burn down so that he lost the work that had taken him a decade and he promptly decided to sit down and write it again and . . . he claimed the rewritten version was better? He’d have had to have.  (Thomas Carlyle, “The French Revolution, A History”  J.S. Mill’s maid burned it by mistake.)  How many times was he tortured, unable to recall that perfect turn of phrase, unable to release the nagging suspicion that his original juxtaposition he’d managed, was the better one?

I did mine again and considered the places where I could nudge and improvise and approximate.  I don’t know if the redux was any better, but it wasn’t high art and eventually it was done.  Looking back I can remember the moment right before complete acceptance that it was lost.  I was trying fury on for size.  I had enough distance to see that I was preparing to explode.  Not exploding uncontrollably, but rather readying myself for loud release.  I tried on a mini explosion as a way of compromise.  It worked.  I got a bit angry.  I swore a bit.  And moved on to do what clearly had to be done.  Perhaps I know the material a bit better now.  Perhaps.