This Message Will Self-Destruct

When I was in elementary school, it was fashonable to have an autograph book signed by one's classmates at the end of the school year. I had one of those books at the end of fourth grade. My mother looked through it and found a page where one of the boys had written some mild vulgarity. She was incensed. "That should just be ripped right out of the book!" she announced.

I didn't want to rip out that page, because there were autographs on the other side, including one from a teacher I particularly liked. I just shrugged and waited for my mother's anger to subside.

Many years later, I found that autograph book in a box of old things in Mom's garage, as my brother and I were cleaning it out prior to selling the house. I began flipping through the pages, and discovered that one had been torn out. The names of the bad boy, the teacher, and anyone else who signed that page, are lost forever.

Perhaps worse than what Mom did to me was what she did to herself. In the garage was a bundle of old letters, tied with a ribbon. They were the letters my parents had written to each other during the year prior to their marriage. The letters were sweet and dull, mostly mundane recaps of daily activities alternating with declarations of love and devotion. They were in college at the time (different locations), and often wrote about problems with classes and grades. Dad wrote long letters with numbered pages. Mom rarely wrote more than two or three short paragraphs. One of the letters written by Mom had a sentence that was thoroughly blacked out. I assumed it was obliterated because of a spelling or grammar error (Mom had many, often crossed out and corrected). But then I came to another letter where someone with scissors (Mom, no doubt) had cut out part of a sentence. The context seemed innocuous, a description of a class discussion. "My question, which she didn’t get to, was [missing]." I couldn't really imagine that Mom had asked a question so embarrassing that it needed to be redacted.

I came to another letter, written by Dad, where a large section in the middle of a page had been cut out. Still another of his letters had the entire bottom half of one page cut off. Since he wrote on both sides of the paper, that meant that the next page was also censored. Additionally, three pages were simply missing, presumably destroyed. Several more letters had portions neatly snipped out. It was frustrating.

When had Mom mutilated these letters? Since the collection included both her and Dad's letters, neatly sorted and bundled, my guess was that at some point she had collected the letters, re-read them, and censored them at that time, before storing them. Given the overall nature of the letters, and the surviving content of the ones that were censored, it's hard to imagine what needed hiding, or who she thought she was hiding it from. Did she suspect that her mother would snoop through her things? Did she imagine her future children, fifty years later, being shocked or offended? Was she trying to spare her future self an embarrassing memory?

My guess is that, all those years later, she wouldn't have remembered what it was that she cut out. I can't ask her now.