Yes, my taxes are late (again) but filing online gave me time to rethink the whole process

First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

Recently, I did my taxes online, for the first time.

Yes, I’m well aware, my taxes were done late.

This year was my 10th return. For the previous nine years, I’d submitted my tax returns by mail, sealing them in envelopes preaddressed to Winnipeg.

For as long as I can remember, once a year, some time in the summer (I get my tax tardiness from my parents), my family celebrated Tax Weekend. When I say “celebrated,” I mean that my parents would sit at the table facing each other, heads down, my father licking his fingers to flip the tax form’s blasted pages, my mother keying numbers into a solar-powered calculator that displays figures almost too faded to see. My brother and I were free to watch cartoons. Our dinner table became shingled in green and pink forms, we’d find bent staples on the floor with the soles of our feet, and it was frozen fish sticks for dinner.

At 16, I joined my parents at the tax table when I started working. I participated in the curses and the calculator squinting. My brother went on with SpongeBob. For a long time, Tax Weekend appeared to me to be a given, and as with many traditions, I never thought to question it.

This year, I dared to wonder. Everyone I know (save my parents) does their taxes online. And why shouldn’t I?

I downloaded the right software, plugged in the numbers on my T4 forms, and boom – done! In an hour, the program had worked out the calculations and submitted it for me, eliminating the need for any meandering – intellectual or physical. I did not get confused, nor did I get to say my yearly hello to the neighbourhood mini-mall post office attendant. I got the final magic number for my refund, which has always seemed to be the point of taxes.

Oddly, I felt that something was missing.

Taxes are taxing. Isn’t that the promise? Here I was, with a whole weekend on my hands. I could even save my fish sticks for another time.

Perhaps the final magic number isn’t everything (even if it is a refund). Perhaps the process I followed to reach that magic number in the past – that is, with great hassle – is what gave meaning to the whole experience? In removing my usual struggle, the online tax form let me see the old paper form anew.

Unlike its online counterpart, the paper tax form discloses its convoluted logic. Pen in hand, you jump, rather athletically, from page to page. You follow all kinds of weird instructions. Float this number down 14 lines to this box. Multiply it by 2 per cent. Subtract line 90 from line 89. If the result is negative, write “0.” Enter this amount on line 42800 of your return.

The paper tax form puts the most experimental narratives to shame.

Unusual, too, it requests that readers identify themselves by leaving their marks. What a librarian might call vandalism, the CRA calls civic duty. It asks us to get crafty. Paper tax forms invite taxpayers to transform the printed pages with inky idiosyncrasies, to unfasten and rebind, to annotate. Locate and tear the perforated green and pink leaves. Fold, then cut along the dotted line. Lick and seal this envelope. Then, send it into the world so it can reach new audiences.

Manipulating paper, I realized, had grounded me in a physical reality. Sun would light my work. If it didn’t, I opened the blinds. I tasted the adhesive on the envelope. The rain dampened my face on my way to the post office. The CRA might tabulate me every year, but I liked to imagine, at least, that a person in the business of deciphering my handwriting and number crunching sees people as more than pixels.

The paper tax return asked me to read – it was complicated. It involved curiosity, problem solving and patience.

I’m grateful for these realizations, but I won’t be doing another tax return on paper. A paper tax return requires, for me, a full Tax Weekend and choosing this bureaucratic labyrinth just for the intellectual exercise is a luxury I can no longer afford. The printed tax booklet (and only small parts of it are used at that) is also only useful for just one year. How many trees are pulped to indulge my bookish fondness for paper tax forms? From now on, I’d rather not need to ask the question.

So I say goodbye to the tax form of yore, remembering, all the while, what it has taught me about reading closely. The tactile work also showed me how to slow down. And I appreciate the many people involved in the (often invisible) making and reception of documents such as these.

I can, and should, bring this attention to detail I’ve learned doing paper returns to the online tax form and beyond. What will happen when I linger among the pixels? I don’t know. I’m open to meandering. Maybe I’ll find out next year. If not – and the CRA will hold me to it – I have the rest of my life to return.

Claire Lloyd lives in Vancouver.