My First Monet

First time I ever saw a Monet, I'm betting it was on a calendar.  When I was growing up, our calendar came from a car-dealership or a gas-station.  Later, I'm pretty sure, it was from the "Insurance Man."  Anyway, these were free.  They came in the mail, once a year to thank us for our "patronage."  The ones I remember best had just the one picture, maybe six inches by eight, of either a covered bridge or a farm scene.  The actual calendar was stapled underneath the picture.  You tore off each month as it passed.  In our house, the calendar was tacked up by the telephone which back then lived on a an uncomfortably small table with an attached chair in the hall between the kitchen and the dining room.  (At one grandmother's house the phone was by the front door, at the other's in the kitchen, but always then on some furniture specific to the purpose.  What's happened, I wonder to all those telephone tables?)  Everybody I knew had at least one of these free calendars by the phone, sometimes with a second, more for decoration, usually above the sink.  Some time around Junior High School, when I started mixing more with middle class kids "from town", I probably saw my first calendars someone had actually purchased.  They were bigger than the free ones I knew, prettier in their way, and each month had it's own picture as well as page.  I don't remember exactly, but I believe that may be where, as I say, I saw my first Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, etc.

A little later, when we had the money and these bigger wall calendars had become more the norm, I remember we bought one for my Grandma Craft, and then bought her a new one each year.  She liked New England scenes best, as I recall; white, salt-box churches and brilliant Fall leaves, that sort of thing.  Still, she kept the little free calendars, from the drugstore and so on by the phone, to write on.  The bigger ones she kept, from year to year in a box we found when she went into the nursing home.  "Too nice to write in" the note on top of the box said.

Someone better educated and more curious than myself has doubtlessly done the history and written the whole story of how pictorial, paper calendars came to be a feature in most American homes. I can attest from my own experience as a child come to sense even so late as the nineteen sixties to having been in rural houses wherein the calendar was the only art on the wall, often as not the only picture not of either dead relatives or Jesus.

January first every year at the bookstore where I work, our calendars go on sale at 50% off.  Tables are set up in the lobby and black, collapsible bins are filled with the wall calendars.  The boxed calendars, "page-a-day" mostly, and the desk-calendars are piled in the middle.  People look forward to this sale every year.  There are always folks lined up at the door, the day the calendars are discounted.

The proliferation of subjects, the variety of formats and fonts, the staggering variety of available calendars would seem to have slackened as yet not one whit for all the talk of our having moved into a "post-paper world."  (The options for cat-fanciers alone could paper Versailles.) I do not doubt some other, younger scholar of the subject, less concerned with art and history than the one suggested above, has already undertaken to examine and enumerate all the ways in which the rising generation has learned to tell time and mark the passage of the seasons on their computers and phones.  I would be mildly interested to know if the ubiquity of day, date and time of day on devices seemingly never not on may not eventually effect something like that Buddhist notion of the enlightened individual living constantly in the moment.  (I recently read a piece online about the falling away of wristwatches as a graduation gift, as younger people now tell time on their phones, much as they do everything else.)  Meanwhile though, I would note that there are still as many college students buying calendars in the bookstore's lobby as there are elderly persons hunting up an unsold Mary Engelbreit.  More women than men at the calendar tables, but then it has always been so.

My own, uneducated guess as to the ongoing popularity of this seemingly archaic way of marking the days has less to do with the utility of the traditional calendar than with the very human need to decorate our caves with something only a little less changeable than a screensaver but somehow more substantially present for being printed on paper and hung on the wall or open on a desk.  The art that stays a month before us, to be caught in a glance or studied at leisure, the joke refreshed each day in a new New Yorker cartoon, even something so basic as a proper, big, black numeral on a uniform white square, these things pace out our time in reliable and satisfying ways that no LED-lit corner of our screens has yet satisfied.  We are the time-telling animal, our mortality ever present to us to an extent unknown -- so far as we know -- to any other creature in the universe.  We remind ourselves in aphorisms and photographs, in conversation, in art, and yes, in even humble, discounted calendars not so much that we will die as we do that we are not yet dead.  There are still Monets to look at.  No bad thing then, and something we may well miss if and when paper calendars go.  I suspect we'd print them out ourselves and put them on the walls even if they served no other purpose whatsoever.

(I say all this without a thought to the fact that I myself make a calendar to sell every year.  Honest.  This year's are sold out anyway, I'm proud to say.)