The Census and Me -- Life in 10-Year Chunks

No one can defy actuarial tables forever -- and my father died at age 95 in 2004. So after making cameo appearances in 10 straight Censuses (always living in New York or Connecticut), Salem Shapiro has now vanished for eternity from the nation's rolls. Even though the last time I shared a Census form with my parents was in 1960, I sense his absence (and that of my mother, Edith, who died in 1997) as I look down this innocuous 10-question survey. For a Census is not just a way for demographers to determine the population, or for the government to fulfill its constitutional obligation to apportion seats in the House of Representatives. This national head count also represents an inescapable life marking post for us all.

While personally centuries away from fitting descriptions like "senior citizen" or "geriatric" or "elderly," it is sobering to realize that this will be my seventh Census. There are no stories about me as a precocious 3-year-old demanding to be counted for the 1950 Census, but I do dimly recall a neighbor (moonlighting as a Census taker) ringing our front door bell in Norwalk, Conn., in 1960. That was the Census when we qualified as the perfect replica of a post-war Ozzie-and-Harriet American family -- a father who went to the office, a non-working mother, and two children (a shout-out to my younger sister Amy) attending public school.

The 1970 Census caught me in my first post-college incarnation living in a group house on Capitol Hill in Washington while working as a fledgling reporter for Congressional Quarterly. When I filled out my Census form a decade later, I was nominally living alone on Capitol Hill, but, in reality, I was searching for an apartment with my soon-to-be-wife, Meryl. By a quirk of timing during this turbulent life-adjustment decade, the 1970 and 1980 Census forms missed my two years of graduate school at the University of Michigan, a brief starter marriage, and four other Washington apartments.

Beginning in 1990, each Census form has produced identical answers from me: married, no children, living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The only difference (dammit) is that each Census I somehow seem to be 10 years older.

This personal history -- devoid of anything unusual like ashrams in the Himalayas or dizzying relocations by the Witness Protection Program -- is designed to illustrate how much all of our lives are embodied in the who-where-and-when of the Census. In the fondly remembered 1995 independent movie "Smoke", Harvey Keitel plays a Brooklyn tobacconist who photographs the same neighborhood intersection every morning, creating a montage of life by that simple act. The pace of the Census is a tad more leisurely, but the same principle applies -- we are all the sum of the time-lapse details of our decades.

Along with my Census questionnaire (which arrived in an envelope with the intimidating message: "YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW") is a letter from the director urging me to fill out the form for the most selfish of reasons: "The amount of government money your neighborhood receives ... depends on these answers. That money is used for services for children and the elderly, roads, and many other local needs."

While undeniably true (many government programs allocate money based on population), it also is the kind of show-me-the-money argument that fails to speak to our better instincts. In the letter, there is neither an appeal to citizenship nor any reference to Article I of the Constitution, which calls for an "enumeration" every 10 years. Given the popularity of Congress (17 percent approval in the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll), it probably is not much of a selling point that, as the letter states, "Census results are used to decide the number of representatives each state has in the U.S. Congress."

The letter from the director does mention -- despite rigorously enforced confidentially – that individual Census information does become public after 72 years. What that means for me is that in 12 years, I will finally get to look at the Census answers that my parents provided in 1950, when I was 3 years old. I am actually eager to look at all the Census forms from our neighborhood in Norwalk in 1950. I just wish that my father could be sitting there at the microfilm reader with me.