I can't seem to help it. Something always seems to remind me of something else.
Take yesterday's NY Times book review of their own Gail Collins, who's just published, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present.(With the right font, all that does fit on the cover.)
The reviewer, Francine Prose, recounts one of the incidents in the book when Ms. Collins tells the story that the draft of a Congressional bill to insure equal pay for women was discovered to have been filed "under B--for broads."
To have to have passed through that era is to completely believe this could be true. In fact, someone was likely thinking they were gallant by not using the other "B" word.
So, filing systems are in the eyes of the filer who bring their own spelling, alphabet and view of the world to the job. What this reminded me of was Jimmy Breslin's account of doing his research for what became his lively biography of Damon Runyon, the legendary New York newspaperman who wrote for the Hearst papers.
It seems through some philanthropic gesture, the University of Texas came up with enough money to buy the entire New York Hearst newspaper morgue. So here's Jimmy, in Texas, doing research about a New York newspaperman being confronted by some New Yorker's filing system that would place a card in the M drawer telling anyone interested that:
MENTAL HEALTH.
SEE INSANITY
Which of course proves that everything has got to be someplace.
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