Here

“Turn every page,” Robert Caro says. So when you’re at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art flipping through the David Herbert Papers box 2 of 7, “Correspondence: Illegible and Unidentified 1968-92” folder, you might suddenly encounter your father’s handwriting.

It’s a postcard from Zurich, stamped 1958, and signed only “Yrs, E” so I had to check my instincts with my sisters. “Does this look like Dad to you?” “Absolutely!” says one. “Definitely!!!,” says the other. “The handwriting, phrasing, and the E at the end.” There’s also the familiarity of the art on the front. My father admired that kind of elegant antique statuary. He sent and received loads of art postcards, pinning his favorites up next to his easel in his studio.

But what is it about the phrasing or tone that says “dad” to us? First, the “Etats Unis” in the address is classic Earle. He liked to use foreign words but never learned more than a few bits of French and Italian. Then there’s the throwaway tone that starts in the middle of his journey and ends with “thought of you….” The first few sentences are clipped and simple but they shift into dashes and a fragment at the end. My sisters and I can’t read the noun in the last sentence so we speculated: “Thought of you, going through the [Guimet?] too.” Is it another museum? Another location en route? The message feels dashed off.

So what did I learn? My father was in Europe at the end of 1958, while he had a painting in the Whitney’s annual show. If that show was up for another week then this was written in December. The date on the postmark is difficult to read but it’s clear he didn’t mail the card until he returned to Paris. He visited the Museum Rietberg, which my sister says she saw more than sixty years later and also admired. “Here” is Zurich, Paris, New York, and D.C.

What does it mean? I was here because I had found my father’s name in David Herbert’s address book. In the 1950s Herbert worked at art galleries in New York City, where my father exhibited. Now, the postcard implies he and Herbert were friends, not just professional acquaintances. The “yours” and the “E” imply a relationship that was casual or familiar. This was not a momentous find, but it was satisfying. Every piece of evidence helps. And the process itself reveals how interconnected we all are to each other, and the past to the present. This random piece of paper survived when others didn’t only because David Herbert, someone my father once knew, saved it; after his death someone else thought to preserve seven boxes of his life’s output at the Smithsonian, where someone else cataloged it— there in “unidentified” and “illegible.” It is no longer unidentified: I informed the archivist that Earle Olsen was the author so the postcard should be moved to the folder labeled “Correspondence: O-P, General 1957-92.” That marks another relationship: me and the archive, helping each other. I’ve been here before. Here is one more piece in the jigsaw puzzle of my family memoir.