My object all sublime ....

… I shall achieve in time —

To let the punishment fit the crime —

The punishment fit the crime;

And make each prisoner pent

Unwillingly represent

A source of innocent merriment!

Of innocent merriment!

I was talking with Mother today. She's concerned about a lot of the stuff she has accumulated over the years: in the house, stacked up in the garage, and in a storage unit. She was talking about how she might get it cleaned up some day. And then I asked her a question that has been on my mind for a while.

By the time Father died eight years ago, he had for many years been spending a lot of time each day on the computer. Doubtless a lot of this time was spent emailing with old Army buddies, or browsing random shit on the Internet the way I do. But I also know that over the years he wrote a lot. He used to write funny shows every year for his local Rotary club: probably those scripts are still on his computer somewhere. What else might he have written? Did he crank out the Great American Novel before he died? I asked Mother if she had looked through his files … or even, more basically, whether she had the password to open his computer?

She's not sure she has the password. And she looked briefly through his files looking for a couple of things, but never checked out the rest of it. (So if she looked through them at all, that must mean she has the password … doesn't it? Am I missing something?) She did say that one year he joined the NaNoWriMo challenge to write a novel during the month of November. But she never read the resulting novel. Presumably it's on the computer somewhere.

She thinks it would be great for Someone to take on the task of weeding through Father's electronic file folders and saving out anything he wrote that's worth saving. And then she clarified that by "Someone" she means me. Of course she couched this in terms of me being the most logical person to do it. And of course she's right, in the same way that it's my job to go through his old academic library to decide what's worth saving … or at any rate what I personally am interested in taking. (I think the idea is that these two predicates are more or less synonymous.)

But I wonder: is this going to be another Ghost-of-Christmas-Yet-to-Come moment for me? If I take on the job of prowling through his file folders—which might be disorganized, abortive, containing random flashes of true brilliance in among heaps of ash—what will it tell me about how I need to reform my own life?

• That I need to make my output easy to find and reach?
• That I need to be clear about distinguishing what's good from what's worthless?
• That maybe I should actually delete the garbage, so no-one else has to deal with it?
• That in the same way I should publish the stuff that's any good, so it's out there in the world and that part of the work has already been done?

These would all be good lessons to learn, if only I take them to heart.

Or maybe it will turn out that Father's files are already more organized than mine, and I can learn how he did it. But given the disorder that usually accompanied his physical possessions, I kind of doubt it.

The only time my Father played in The Mikado, he played Pooh-Bah and not the Emperor. But I have a feeling that this job will be a case of Karma giggling at me up her sleeve.

Or more simply, this job will be a clear case of the punishment fitting the crime.