The Art of Losing

by Marion Bailey

A few weeks ago I lost my address book, the entire record of my social world.  I realize address books are going the way of the dinosaurs - why write down an address in a book when you can type it into a device.  But I grew up in a world without computers:  recording the addresses  and telephone numbers  of the important people in my life was the height of organization. I owned my first book in my early twenties.  Now seventy I’ve owned four or five different books, approximately a different book for each decade of my life.

I had owned this record of my social life for at least ten years, because I remember carefully transferring  names from my previous book while my father watched;  he was the model for carefully kept records, and he died more than ten years ago. My book was not in good shape:  the carefully chosen cloth cover, with a Biblical theme, was ripped, pages were loosened.  I knew I had to replace the book but it was a daunting task, transferring a lifetime of connections into a new book.

I used to read my address book to review the history of my life. My daughters in their twenties and thirties moved around.  Different addresses and phone numbers were carefully recorded and crossed out when they went to a new place. One daughter went to college and graduate school in the mid-west, lived in Japan, later moved to New York City for a first job and her own apartment. Another daughter worked at an outdoor school in Maryland, moved to New Hampshire for a master’s degree, to Vermont for a teaching job and back to Massachusetts where she now teaches.

My friend Bill’s name was recorded; he died of cancer several years ago.  Seeing his address and telephone number reminded me of how much I loved and missed him. My father’s trajectory at the end of his life was in the book:  first his Long Island address, next the move to Florida, finally the Beverly address where he moved to be close to Ed and me.

   Before my father died he gave me his address book, the record of his long and full life. I had the task of calling my father’s friends and family to tell them of his death.  Because everyone was listed in his book, calling was easy.  I’ve kept his book because it’s  a record of his life.  Once in a while I look through it;  I’m always amazed and heartened by the richness of the life recorded there.

How did I lose my address book?  I was rushing.  Although I knew it was foolish to take it out of the house, I did.  I needed my sister-in-law’s address in Arizona to mail her a  Christmas  present.  After the post office, I walked to the supermarket with the book under my arm. The last I saw of it was when I went through the checkout line — the book was safely in the child’s seat of the supermarket carriage.  I went back a few hours later when I realized it was gone.  No one in the grocery store had seen it.  The book had vanished into thin air.

I felt naked without it.  I had no record of my life:  it was as if friends and family had disappeared.  Even my daughters’ peripatetic lives were lost to me.  A few days later I searched for a replacement.  I found only one  in the different stores I looked –- obviously people are not using address books anymore.  Names, addresses, phone numbers are all stored electronically.  There are no more cross outs, just deletions.  If a friend dies, it’s easy to delete him from your IPhone.

My new book is glaringly white, a loose-leaf, with a sticker on the inside back cover giving a phone number if I want to order more pages.  Will this company still be in business if  I ever need new pages.  I doubt it.  I started to reconstruct my new book, address by address.  Luckily it was two weeks before Christmas so many return addresses  were on cards sent to me.  I made a few phone calls to get more addresses.  I even found new addresses on email.

I began to like my new book.  My life looked orderly.  Each entry was carefully entered with a lot of white space on the page.  No cross-outs, no blurred ink, no torn pages, no painful names of friends I don’t see anymore.  There is a feeling of lightness, of going forward, a fresh beginning.  I would have held on to my old book if I hadn’t lost it, but I can see the benefits of letting  go, starting over on a clean page. Besides, I still have my father’s address book.  When I first lost my book I kept thinking of the lines in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”

The art of losing isn’t hard to master

So many things seem filled with the intent

To be lost that their loss is no disaster


Marion Bailey taught English in a high school in New York City and at North Shore Community College for thirty-four years.  "The Art of Losing" can be found in Marion's self- published book Looking Over the Fence.