Every once in a while, you still see them. The person in front of you in the grocery line who waits until the cashier has finished ringing up their order. THEN they start to rummage through their purse looking for... their checkbook.

Then a second search for a pen, and finally they start to write. Eventually they’ll pass it to the cashier who hands them their receipt. But wait… they're not done yet. Now they have to enter the amount in their ledger and return the checkbook to their purse or back pocket. Finally gathering up their belongings, they give way to the rest of us, impatiently clutching debit/credit cards at the ready, hoping to make up for all the lost time.

It’s hard to remember that it wasn’t so long ago that everyone wrote checks or paid cash for nearly everything. After my mother passed away, I spent the next months closing her estate and clearing out my parent’s home. I was astounded to find that my mother had kept every one of her canceled checks, in order, running from the early 1950’s until April 2003, the week before she died. They were in exact numerical order and perfectly notated as to what each check was for. It was in fact, a diary of her life. And in many ways it was also a chronicle of my family’s daily life for nearly five decades.

My father, a Navy pilot, was almost always overseas, and we lived on what the Navy called a monthly “allotment”, which was, in those days, a rather modest amount of money. Those cancelled checks told me how she often bought our school clothes on “layaway”, which meant one could make payments over several months, obtaining the items only after the final payment. 

I saw how much a tonsillectomy cost in 1958, how much my braces set her back. I saw how by the end of the month, the grocery checks got smaller and smaller as the allotment ran out. I also saw, with chagrin, how many times she “bailed me out” as a young adult, long after I had left home(generosities I had long forgotten). As I laughed and cried over these checks, I was grateful to have this record of my parent’s life.

But those days are gone, of course, and now we depend on our cards and electronic banking. Our kids won’t read our past by finding a box of old checks after we’re gone, but there will be  someone else who will be reading our past, just as surely as they are reading our present. Every time we swipe one of those plastic cards we are making an electronic record of our lives; there are legions of entities that take notice of every move we make. As far as they are concerned, we are basically the sum of our purchases.

Thanks to legislation proposed by State Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last October, California companies will not be able to force employees to have electronic devices placed under their skin. Great sigh of relief there, but just wait… that cell phone in your pocket may make all make your cards as antiquated as my mother’s collection of cancelled checks.

The headline on this blog is wrong.  It should have read

“A Private Life is History”

-Citizen Voices blogger Candace Suerstedt is a filmmaker and a mother of three who lives in Coronado.