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My Precious . . . My Notebook

By on April 12, 2022

By Michelle Goering

As a child, I preferred the realm of my imagination to the physical world. So I was never attached to a special blanket or stuffed animal. I do recall carrying a kitten in yellow overalls by its blue ear, and perching a humpty-dumpty stuffed egg in red plaid on my toy shelf. But I wasn’t passionate about them; I didn’t carry them with me everywhere or sleep wrapped around them.

That kind of reliance on an object developed later. My adult security blanket for the last forty years has been a notebook. Or rather, a long series of notebooks of diverse sizes, colors, and materials. I figure I’ve filled three or four notebooks each year of my adulthood; after forty years, that’s between 120 and 160 notebooks since my late teens. Most of them are in landfills now, I suppose; I didn’t want anyone else to read them, so I decided against recycling. I imagine the worms enjoying the tasty paper, the bindings returning to dust, the scraps of pages blowing across the dirt in Kansas, Arizona, Connecticut, and California, trailing words that disassemble into their individual letters, their meaning lost for now but being recycled into new possibilities.

I always have a couple of full notebooks, the most recent ones, in my office cubby, just in case I need to refer back a bit. The current notebook goes where I go, in the house or out. It’s next to my morning coffee, in my bag when I leave the house, and on my nightstand at bedtime. My notebooks are not organized; they’re the equivalent of the counter next to the front door—a dumping ground for whatever I’ve accumulated, arranged as a chronological record of my thoughts. They contain to-do lists, rants, notes from meetings, addresses, movie recommendations, ideas for stories, possible birthday gifts, prayers of supplication in moments of despair—God, help me! scrawled large, ignoring the lines—math problems, essays, gripes, lists of places to submit work, and columns of pros and cons for big decisions.

My notebook of choice has shifted over time. I’ve become something of a connoisseur. I long used spiral-bound cheapies, battered, the springs stretched out and forever catching on my sweater. Friends have gifted me with fancy notebooks with leather covers or in a cute little size. I love the look of them, but they’re awkward to use, too heavy or too tiny, and not flexible enough.

My notebook of choice now is a hoity-toity one. I drool over Moleskine brand notebooks. Snobby, I know. They even smell expensive. So, I ask for them for birthday and holiday gifts, and if I find them on sale, I stock up. They lie flat, the size is perfect and lined properly with the college-ruled, not the wide-ruled, lines. I’ll drink any old coffee, but I’m particular about my notebooks.

Even today, after all these volumes have passed through my life, I get a thrill when I reach the last page, as I will any day now, and get to put my pen to a fresh clean notebook. My current one is pale yellow except for the grease smears and water spots. I love to eat and write. But the next one will be bright red. I alternate the colors so I’ll grab the right one.

I used to be intimidated by the blankness of a new notebook, but I’m done thinking these have to be filled with worthy thoughts. They’re the tool I use to make my life work. I need words in order to prioritize, remember, understand my own feelings, and see the reality of my relationship to others and my actions. The notebook is my cure for insomnia, for anxiety, for world-weariness. But I rarely look back at my writing beyond the few pages of, say, the previous week.

Flipping through this last week’s pages, I see:

  • Ideas for recipes to tackle our abundance of homegrown bok choy
  • List of conversations I want to have with each of my grown sons
  • A sketch and some measurements for the materials for a new patio cover
  • A list of notes and letters I intend to write, any day now
  • Book recommendations from my sister-in-law
  • Musings on my mother-in-law’s aging process, and my own
  • Naw-Ruz (Baha’i New Year) Resolutions
  • An early draft of a memoir piece about Mom’s apple pie

But though I don’t keep my old notebooks, and don’t refer back to the no-doubt brilliant ideas and thrilling minutiae of my life recorded there, the notebooks have done their job. They can be released from duty. They’ve helped me keep my inner balance, bring myself to account each day, understand my loved ones and the world around me, and make sure I don’t forget to pick up toothpaste. Ooo! And sourdough bread. Let me write that down.

 

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Michelle Goering has been writing forever, and for an audience for about a year. She is a musician with a background in publishing, married and the mother of twin college-age sons. A San Diegan originally from a Kansas farm, she’s recently published in Her View from Home, Sasee, and Christian Science Monitor: Home Forum.

Michelle can be found on Facebook at Michelle Goering.

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