Losing Notebooks

It's hard to say goodbye to a good notebook. It's even harder when you didn't even know it had gone. Tonight, after throwing my weight back into the blogosphere, I had decided I was going to make my first post an old favorite. Six pages, tucked away in a notebook I had had for over a decade. We had been through a lot together. We started college, transfered college, quit college, started college and graduated college. I drank with it, abused it, caught it with a friend and stole it back. Pen and pencil faded pages new. We still had years to go.

It was a magical night. The sky was black as tar, sticky to my fingers and dripping into my body. I was across the river in Nebraska, slicing through valleys once gorged by glacial retreat, following trails that had been traversed for 10,000 years. That is where this notebook and I reached an apex. A jolt and I dropped the ball and it was rolling. Page after page went by in gusts of wit and snarl. With a cough I would look back in amazement at what this notebook had allowed me to do. I was Whitman in my lyrical esotericism and, fittingly, Cather in my connection to the world around me. What seemed to babble out was reformed into precise arithmetic on the page. I had become the new Maya Angelou.

Years later we found a similar magic near dusk, half-awake, on a porch in the city. Me with my feet up and the notebook nuzzled into my faded yellow plaid. I had been through a rough time, what with uprooting my prairie grass and no clear pastures for my seed to spread. And the notebook was just there. It started simply enough. I thumbed through, admiring our progression, and we had some good laughs. I gently fingered the pages, one by one, soaking it all in. All the blues and reds were in place, but some of the whites had faded, some had stained. I brought it closer and let it's dull, distinct smell fill my lungs. Turn after turn until, amazingly, I found a clean, crisp clump of pages. They had been lost in the middle as I had methodically filled from the front when formal and from the back when something just needed to be jotted. This was a pristine, ancient forest. What wisdom did it hold, animals did it house? Before I knew it, we were back to our old ways, friends and maybe more. We could be alone together yet were comfortable in groups. I knew its frays and I now knew its smell and I knew it had a hidden treasure. In turn, it knew so many of my secret ambitions, my abstractions and my dedications. A glimpse, a spark, the streetlights turned on and buzzed low in the wake of passing cars. There we came together again.

The months flipped the years as days and days were branded with the unflattering X. I moved again, this time further from the dying root structure of my home, further from my farmland genus, and closer to the unknown. The notebook came with me. As other books lobbied for my attention, I saw it at the corner of my desk waiting patiently. Then came the stacks. It started with syllabi, unopened mail and keys, but that led to boxes of staples, stocking caps and the occasional rogue cigarette box. It was disappearing. And now it's gone.

Where, when and why can't explain this away as well as is can. Doubtless a turning leaf will fall from the tree and get lost in the scatter of other leaves from other trees in other lawns. There are piles to be made before more changes come and turn it all to dirt. The inevitable shuffle is stifling and an ability to catalog what has come and gone is a double-sided virtue. Sometimes it hurts. I lost a good notebook.