Scan, Fan

I spent the remainder of November in 2019 scanning every letter, postcard, child drawing, message in a bottle, etc. I commandeered the printer at my dad’s office and shuffled to the side when affidavits, estate planning documents, and other office docs came through. During the banality of scanning 1,300+ pages, I am proud to say that I became a scanning aficionado of sorts. Some days, I was on a roll scanning thorough 8 letter sets. But I’d groan when I opened an envelope and it was thin rice paper. This meant that I would have to face each tissue paper sheet onto the scanning glass, scan it, send it by email, and then compile each sheet into a single PDF file. Talk about first world problems…and my grandma didn’t write short little notes. We’re talking at least 5+ pages.

I call 1953—1967 the dark years because many of the letters were rice paper. Also because it was B.T.(Before typewritter) and B.G (Before Guam).

So I’d stand there and try and get as many letter sets scanned as I could in between being a runner for my dad’s law office. I had just graduated with my MA at UOG and my dad let me creep on the world of law but I had clearly found my true calling, which was scanning. For the normal pages, I’d stack them into the feeder but I always held the bottom sheets so they wouldn’t get sucked into the over eager printer. This thing had no mercy when it came to torn or bent pages. The damn feed wheels would rip through the more sensitive pages with little tears in them and then tell on me with an incessant beeping sound. In the 1990 letters, grandpa used his computer printer that spit out 24" long thick bond. Suffice it to say, it was noisy. I’m sure Aunty Mer (Meredith, my dad’s office mananger) appreciated this while she tried to work. The printer had no time for the aging of the letters and don’t get me started on staples…

All in all, it served me well as I was able to get most of the letters digitized. I inputted each date and the number of pages and for the first time, enjoyed working with numbers. Does anyone else out there take joy in minutiae when tackling large scale projects? Numbers were concrete…thinking about plotting out a novel was abstract and daunting. Plus, I hadn’t read through all the letters yet.