Mincey’s Musings
Year One, Week Forty-Nine

How many kids do you know who would like to have a file cabinet? You are reading the writing right now of a former child who not only wanted but craved one.

Of course, I wanted a file cabinet to complement my fantasy school teaching life. And when I got it, it was a doozy!

My brother (Momma’s other boy) Jerry Sampson worked for a time as a custodian for the Knox County Schools. This gave him access to several things that were discarded. He once brought our family very good, solid, hard plastic student chairs. Of course, these found their way into my classroom of imagination. I also remember a card index and a
hand-cranked adding machine.

I told Jerry to be on the lookout for a filing cabinet for me. He found one, but had no way to deliver it. It just so happened that Momma’s only daughter (Anna Mae) was in a significant relationship with Joe Hillard, the father of her two youngest children.

I must admit, I didn’t initially care much for Joe. He was loud, and I suppose I picked up on my father’s aversion to overly loud people. Joe’s bluster intimidated me when I was younger, but the file cabinet experience showed me that even loud people have good hearts. (His son, my nephew Joe, also has his father’s heart.) Joe liked to cook, and I remember he once cooked my mother a birthday dinner and delivered it to her when a pretty significant snow was on the ground. Joe placed some shelf-liner paper in the bottom of the cardboard box that held the main course. The adhesive was still intact, and I covered an old reading book with the paper. I still have that book, and I always think of Joe and his kindness to Mother whenever I look at the paper covering the book.

Joe had a truck and was more than willing to deliver the file cabinet to me at the Burl Warwick house we rented on Luttrell Road. The cabinet was a beauty, army green, and it still smelled of the old files which it had formerly contained. It didn’t have a lock, but it also didn’t have a dent or scratch.

My enjoyment of this treasure was quashed by my father’s reaction to the delivery. Not only had he not known anything about it (and I always believed this was the root cause of his displeasure), he didn’t want that thing “junking up the house”. How he cussed and ranted and raved, all in an attempt to get Joe to take the cabinet away. Usually Dad’s rages had the desired effect on people. (My Uncle Raymond Dickerson once brought my mother one of her sister’s (Aunt Opal) flower benches for the front porch, and Dad threw such a fit that Raymond took it back home—he delivered it to Mother again after my father’s death.)

But Joe didn’t care how much Dad raged. He said, “Frank, I brought that cabinet to that boy and it’s going to stay here.” After Joe left Dad went into my room where the file cabinet stood, opened one of the drawers, looked at it with undisguised disgust, and slammed it as hard as he could. After that day, he never said another word about it.

That is, not until the day my oldest sister Estelle (Dad’s oldest daughter) and her husband Buford wanted to buy it from me for their flower business. Dad wanted me to just give it to them, but I figured the suffering I endured from the fit he threw upon its arrival warranted me the right to the twenty-five dollars they were willing to pay. I suppose the reason I was willing to part with the cabinet at all was because it reminded me of one of my father’s less shining moments.

But I was not to endure life without a file cabinet. On the back porch of the Warwick house we rented was a file cabinet that looked like many that were in use at Maynardville Elementary and Horace Maynard High when I was a student. The cabinet was metal, about four feet tall, with two card file drawers atop two file drawers for standard manila (not vanilla) folders on the left and a door that went from top to bottom on the right side that opened to reveal three shelves. Cabinets like this one that were in use in the schools were almost always army green, but Dad had painted the one on the back porch of the Warwick house with the same green paint that covered the living room walls. The color was the green that classroom walls used to be painted, and it didn’t look so bad in the living room, but it looked atrocious on that file cabinet, even more so as rust bled through in later years.

After Dad died, I painted this file cabinet with brown high gloss enamel paint and moved it upstairs into the first room that would house my home library. When we moved from the Warwick house in 1984, I asked Jack Warwick if I could have that cabinet, and he let me take it to our next residence at Ann Thacker’s rental house, where it occupied my second home library. It has on occasion also been used in my classrooms at Luttrell Elementary.

Today, that cabinet from the Warwick house resides in my lawnmower shed, where it conceals most of my college notes. It is no less treasured now than then, but necessity has relegated it a less prominent place in location, though not in my heart.

The older I get, the more meaning seems to be attached to inanimate objects because they remind me of the people and happy days of long ago. Indeed, filing cabinets, along with library card catalogues, have been replaced with storage space on computers. Many children now would probably desire a computer or some other technological device, just as I craved a file cabinet back in my youth. I wonder if four decades from now their computers will be as obsolete as my filing cabinets, and what modern ingenuity will have replaced them.

Until next time, I leave you with another thought from emails I have received:

Now that I’m older, here’s what I’ve discovered—
I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.