So THIS happened

When your manuscript goes missing

There is much bigger news in the world, but I choose to close out the week with this:

I live in a little factory town near the Connecticut River where the ivory factory is long closed, but many of the buildings, the roads, and the creek that once supplied the power remain.

It feels like home. I grew up in a little mining town where the mines had long closed, but many of the buildings, the roads, and the creeks that once supplied the power remain.

I am fascinated by the industry of my town. In the 1800s, what was once small subsistence farms became a wealthy little burg built on top of blood and ivory. Ivory is a durable substance that was used in undergarments, hair bobs, and as thin coverings of piano keys.

I don’t think you need an explanation of blood.

Harvesting ivory took an immeasurable toll on the elephants from which it was taken, and on the people involved in the bulk of that harvesting. “Involved” is not the right word, as it implies choice. Elephants were slaughtered for their long teeth, and the people who carried the tusks to port towns in Africa had no choice in the matter. The tusks were then loaded onto ships, as were the people who carried them, as slaves. Both goods were sold, and the beneficiaries built fabulous homes in my town and other towns like it.

As you might imagine, how ivory arrived on our shores didn’t get discussed much in the parlors of Ivoryton, Conn., where new Americans and others gathered in they valley to be part of an incredible transformation of the national economy. Among those factory workers were groups of women called “matching girls,” whose job was to match the ivory — after it had been bleached by the sun in what looked like big greenhouses — so that all the keys of any one piano were the same color.

I decided I wanted to write about those women, but there’s scant record of them, so I figured I’d take the plunge and write a novel. I am not a novelist and making up an entire universe has been an interesting exercise for me. I have committed to writing a page a day, and some of those pages, once I turn around and start editing, aren’t worth the time I took on them, and this is not false modesty talking.

But the story — about a group of women who worked in town’s ivory factories in the 1880s, is mine. And so, in the wee hours of the pandemic in 2020, I started typing the story of six women who came to Ivoryton to work in the factories.

On Wed., I was with the grandbabies, who pretended to have a reaction to the COVID vaccine so that they could get a day off from school. We watched a movie, played games, and pretended to be short-order cooks as we made dinner. While they caught up on their very important video games, I opened my computer to work a little on “Matching Girls.”

But the 291-page manuscript was gone. Just…gone. I’ve lost work before, and have been able to mostly retrieve it, but nothing worked in the hour I spent trying to find where I’d hidden the damn thing — no apps, no work-arounds, nothing.

Then an interesting thing happened. I decided not to care. I mean, that’s a lot of work gone, but I decided to treat it as a message from God that the manuscript wasn’t worth much, anyway, and when (not if) I started again (in a few days, I needed a brief mourning period), I’d remember only the best stuff, anyway. And then I went to work a puzzle with the 10-year olds and actually forgot about it because really, on the scale of world events, it’s all practice, anyway.

This is not how I normally react to disappointment, but a long pandemic has a way of eliminating clouds. I told the granddaughter what happened and she pursed her lips, found two more puzzle pieces that matched and said, “Well, the parts you told me were confusing, anyway.” Everyone needs an editor. Mine is 10 and likes horses.

My son came home just as the twins were sitting down for dinner, and as I was putting on my coat, I mentioned the manuscript to him. This is a multi-degreed man who’s lost a few papers, himself. He pulled out his phone, looked up I-don’t-know-what, took my computer, and found the manuscript, in full, in less than a minute.

I hugged him and told him I couldn’t thank him enough. And then my granddaughter sidled up for a goodbye hug and said, “I didn’t mean what I said about the story being confusing. I just didn’t want you to feel bad.”

Onward, to a manuscript that really is kind of confusing, but it’s mine.