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JOAN E. CHAPMAN
Managing Editor’s Note

proof  | proōf |
noun 1 evidence or argument establishing or helping to establish a fact or the truth of a statement
verb [ trans. ]  3 activate (yeast) by the addition of liquid.

Last Christmas I found a rare treasure–about twenty pounds of letters and “stuff” from when I was eight through eighteen or so. Included were: handmade felt headbands from summer camp; my Beatle Card collection; filthy wadded-up notes, the kind kids pass in class; song lyrics like “The Times They Are A-Changin’” typed on onion skin paper; I also found scores of letters from my sister, brother, mother, father, aunt, teachers, counselors, and friends. 
Everybody had a childhood and some people have stuff from it. What is strange is that I hardly remembered any of my stuff. Honestly. Piece by piece, it was like opening someone else’s mail, except that after the first five to sixty seconds, things leaked back, as though the past was slowly leavening. I don’t think I’m the only one who has had this experience.
This has made me think again about the question of proof. Proof of the “facts” of memory; proof also in terms of self-identity. How did I lose track of all the parts of me that I found in the boxes? More upsetting was that I saw I had lost all those people in their times and places. I knew their names, but I had forgotten what we meant to each other, and who I was in relation to them. 
So it will come as no surprise when I write that I’m now an advocate not only of letter-writing, but hey, why not put aside several boxes and save Stuff in them? Might that help us keep track of our selves? And is that why we
reminisce, to remember our selves? But memories alone are unreliable; this is Stuff that might safeguard details we’ve forgotten. Scraps of paper with to-do lists and dreams, emails (print some out!), old keys, a concert t-shirt that doesn’t
fit anymore, a job review, receipts for books, expired licenses, movie ticket stubs, hospital wristbands, birthday cards and invitations–anything that will serve not only as “proof” that something “happened” but will “proof”—as a transitive verb—aspects of the self that inevitably flatten and fall out of conscious awareness.
One letter, written from camp when I was nine and signed with my camp name, Freddy, seems prescient. I wish I had the long version.
Dear Mom, How are you I’m fine. I’m sorry I haven’t written you I don’t have much to say well I do but there’s so much and one thing leads to another so good-bye. Love Freddy.    
       
 — Joan



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