Two papers from my father

Two things you should know about my father:

1) He reused paper – a LOT. Over and over and over. You’ll notice that this paper, which is pretty typical of his business records, has printing at both ends of the page. Other pages in the same binder feature a collection of classic Yiddish and old-timey songs on the reverse.

My mother must have brought a booklet of lyrics home from something at work and my father whomped the staples out and appropriated the booklet as “good-one-side” printer paper. Hey, if you get bored reading boring mortgage details and bank statements, you can flip them over and sing “To life! L’chaim!” or “June is Bustin’ Out All Over.”

2) But this is the actual flipside of the page shown above. More good-one-side paper: this time, an old business letter that he no longer needed (my father used dot-matrix printers long after everybody else’s were in landfill). The important bit here is not frugality.

This is a formal letter asking for a series of post-dated cheques; pretty standard mortgage-broker letter… with a handwritten note: “wife sick – operation.” He could be insistent, tough even… but only if you weren’t up front with him. If you were honest, if your story checked out, you’d always get the most compassionate response in return. And you can bet he didn’t call this guy back about the cheques.

So those are just two small things I found in a binder. I don’t need them anymore; now I can throw them away.

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