A Vintage Story ~ Keeping the Books

We all know that our lives are blessed with instant electronic

communications. Well, not always a complete blessing with the rain of less than subtle requests to let go of our hard earned dollars! Today, while reviewing writing exercises that I had done in August of 2007, I came upon a very interesting bit of history - recent, I know, but in the electronic world 12 years is considered vintage! The exercise? Write a story of the person keeping business accounts for one week. This story also uses a couple of terms that could be considered as vintage as my 10 year old laptop! Makes yesterday’s blog about reducing and reusing seem almost futuristic? Here is:  Keeping the Books.

Keeping the Books 

The week’s worth of invoices and neatly clipped piles of cash register receipts sat patiently on the boss’s desk. I stared back at them. I was the boss. The first week of my business opening had been full of the excitement of accomplishment that comes with the realization of a dream. My sister had been there and had done all of the keeping of accounts while I was still whirling in the reality of customers investors and advertising. Now she had returned to her own small business and although she had set up my accounting system and given me many contact phone numbers including reminding me of my accountant’s phone number. I felt paralyzed. Part of my paralysis was exhaustion from the incredibly long hours with very little sleep. The other part was a realization of the responsibility I had taken on. I picked up the first invoice just so I could connect with just one piece of paper. It was plastic bags - one thousand of them. I wrote it down faithfully in the ledger. Those clear plastic bags were for the loaves of bread that came from my bakery. The next invoice was for a similar amount of brown paper bags, also for the golden crusty bread that we slid off of the baker’s trays to cool on the shelves. ‘Here’s an invoice for the shelves. I thought that one was paid for? Oh, no that was an earlier one.’ We had added more only after that first week when we realized more storage space was needed in the pantry. ‘Enter it in the ledger. Write a cheque. Put the cheque in an envelope with the receipt. Address it. Stamp it. Put a return address on it. File in the out-basket.’ The first three or four invoices were slow and filled with hesitation. Each one was a reminder of the costs of my dream. The very reality of my dream: a kitchen of my my own that I could share with the neighbourhood. As I paid out the bills with cheques, I felt once again the building of this dream, piece by piece, in the very boards and nails, paint and shingles, ovens and flour, milk and eggs. Each one attached to both dream and reality. When that stack of invoices was complete, I moved to the cash register receipts. A little wavering question mark, wearing a sinister smile, danced in the back of my head. “You won’t make enough money to cover all those bills you just paid. Ha!Ha! You won’t be able to keep this dream alive. Ha!Ha! You’ll have to go back to your pathetic little life working for someone else. Ha!!” ‘Shut up and go away!’ I yelled out loud hoping no one could hear. I was alone in my little bakery - I hoped. It was well past closing time. I picked up the first clip of receipts, balanced them and entered them in the ledger. Bread - sold. My soups - sold. The pies and cakes - sold. Slowly, slowly the amount grew. This part of it seemed heavier than the paying out of money. As the total grew, the heaviness slipped away as I saw the totals beginning to become level with each other. It was a new business, so I didn’t expect it to make money immediately. Although disappointed that the cash flow did remain on the negative side, once all the receipts and invoices were tucked away in envelopes and files, a final walk through the bakery, smelling it’s newness and the drift of bready, yeasty aromas, I was gratified.  Any questions in my soul were settled.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

~ L.P.Hartley, The Go-Between