Colby: Common App Personal Statement

For two years I ran the lost-and-found at the public library, which is a job nobody assigns you. You just become the person who knows where things go. A retainer in a napkin. A single hearing aid. A library card belonging to a man who, it turned out, had died in March, though his card kept circulating because his daughter still used it to check out the large-print westerns he had loved.I started cataloging the drawer the way I cataloged everything else: obsessively, alphabetically, badly.¹I made a spreadsheet. I gave each object a row and a column for "likely owner" and a column for "days unclaimed." What I did not anticipate was how quickly the spreadsheet stopped being about objects. A child's mitten that sat for ninety-one days is not really a mitten anymore. It is a question about who comes back and who does not.My mother thinks I am tidy. My calculus teacher thinks I am precise. Both are giving me too much credit, because what actually drives me is a refusal to let things go unaccounted for.²When I was nine my older brother left for a residential program out of state, and the house reorganized itself around his absence without anyone saying so. His chair migrated to the garage. His name dropped out of the dinner rotation. I think I have spent the years since then trying to build systems where nothing disappears quietly, where every missing thing at least gets a row.So I kept the drawer honest. When the man's daughter finally came in to return the westerns, I had his card flagged, his fines waived, a note in the system that read, simply, "hold for family." She cried at the desk. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I logged the return and slid the books back onto the cart, spine out, in order, where the next person could find them.³I used to think the point of a good system was efficiency. I have come to think the point is dignity: a way of insisting that a hearing aid, a mitten, a dead man's library card, all of it matters enough to be tracked, claimed, returned. The drawer taught me that paying attention is not a personality trait. It is a decision you make, repeatedly, usually when no one is watching.I am applying to study statistics, which surprises people who expect the librarian-type to love novels. But a dataset, to me, is just a very large lost-and-found.⁴Every row is something that belongs to someone. The whole discipline is the patient, unglamorous work of making sure the right things find their way back to the right people. I would like to spend my life doing a more sophisticated version of what I did at that desk: refusing, on principle, to let anything disappear without first being seen. I am still keeping the spreadsheet, by the way. The drawer is empty now. I check it anyway.