“You know what,” Dick said with good humor, “I don’t have the slightest idea who I am!”
—Donald Hall, A Carnival of Losses
One can’t really avoid the various groups we’re associated with.
Some we join with enthusiasm.
Some we’re drafted into with reluctance.
Most don’t demand that we become official card carriers, but the cards still exist.
I only had to survive to become a card-carrying AARP member.
I still wonder why I’d want to carry the card.
In the 1950s, if you were in academia, you could become a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party.
I don’t think it got you a discount at the drugstore.
But I imagine it made a splash at faculty teas—proof that you thought for yourself, or at least, that you wanted people to think you did.
A few years later, Congress came hunting for those cards.
They didn’t care about your nuance or your doubts—just the card.
That was who you were.
Once, I hired a card-carrying Communist to share a 10×10 office with three desks.
He wasn’t the modern, red-tinged progressive kind.
He was proudly Stalinist.
He thought I should be re-educated in a Gulag.
I reminded him that I had served in the very government that allowed him the freedom to be a Stalinist.
He smiled and agreed—that was the flaw in the system, and the reason, he said, that he would eventually win.
He tried to convert me by logic.
I tried to hold my ground by example.
Sometimes, I look through my wallet like a forensic exercise—
as if I’d washed up on a beach, and someone had to figure out who I was by what I carried.
There’s my California driver’s license.
It gives an address.
So—maybe that’s where I live.
Behind it is an old Washington license that belonged to my father.
Same last name, different first.
We look alike.
He looks older.
It could be proof I’m aging backwards.
There’s a red, white, and blue card from the VA.
It implies military service,
but not patriotism.
Just that I showed up.
I’ve got two health insurance cards, two credit cards, a car club membership, a warehouse store pass,
and a lifetime card that gets me into national parks for free.
I also carry nine business cards from the college—
three different titles.
Altogether, it says a lot.
But it doesn’t define.
I want more.
I want a fishing license from New Hampshire.
A library card from Sheridan, Wyoming.
A parking ticket from Tuscaloosa.
A motel receipt from Juneau, Alaska.
Now that would make for a good story when they find me on the beach.
It reminds me of my days in crypto school—top secret communications training.
Every day, I went to class with a Russian ruble in my pocket.
I used to flip it between classes.
Maybe it was perverse.
Maybe it was prophetic.
I sometimes wonder how close I came
to everything
changing.
A Work Progressing 