Keep the envelope

Jenavieve is my daughter, and on the first of this month she told you to pull your three reports and put them in a folder. Good. She learned that from her father. What she did not tell you, because she is forty-six and still believes the important part is the report, is what to do with the envelope.

Keep it.

I spent forty years as a photojournalist, and the lesson of that trade is not about pictures. It is that the caption is the evidence. A photograph of a man on a street corner in Berlin in November 1978 is worth nothing without the strip of paper that says when, where, and who was holding the camera. Editors do not publish the photograph. They publish the caption, and the photograph is what the caption points at.

A credit dispute works the same way. Calvin, who is precise about most things, wrote on the 6th that the bureau has thirty days to reinvestigate. He is correct, and I will add the caption: thirty days from receipt, which § 1681i(a)(1) says in so many words. Receipt is a date on a green card that comes back in the mail. If you do not have the card, you do not have the date, and if you do not have the date, you have a story about a letter, which is not the same as a letter.

So here is what I keep, and where.

The tin on my kitchen table was my mother's. It held biscuits in Lyon and it holds letters in New Hampshire, and every letter I have ever sent to a bureau is in it with its envelope, its certified slip, and the green card that came back, rubber-banded by year. My husband Mikhail keeps his receipts in a cigar box and pretends the two systems are different. They are not. They are the caption.

When you pull the three reports this month, as Jenavieve told you to, do this before you read them: write the date on the front of each, in pen, and put them in something with a lid. Not a drawer. A drawer is where paper goes to become a rumor. When you send a letter, photograph the envelope before it goes, keep the receipt, and when the green card comes back, staple it to your copy. That is one minute of work per letter and it is the difference, in March, between saying "I sent that" and showing it.

Jenavieve will tell you I am being dramatic. She said the same thing at nine when I made her keep a notebook of the birds at the feeder, and she still has the notebook.

The principle, since I was a lecturer for ten years and cannot help naming it: a record you cannot produce is not a record. Everything else about this process, the statutes, the letters, the counting of days, sits on top of that.

You are going to spend this year fixing a file. Start by buying a tin.