WHAT DO NOTEBOOKS REVEAL?

Years ago, I lived next door to an elderly widow who sat on her porch a lot. I used to go sit with her out of compassion combined with a lust for material. She told good stories. She also told me her arthritis was too bad to let her crochet anymore, but she had made sixty-three afghans in her time. She knew this because she had kept a notebook in which she had recorded the colors and amounts of yarn used in each afghan, the number of hours spent crocheting it, and to whom she gave it. She kept another notebook in which she recorded the titles and authors of books she read and what she had thought of them. And in another notebook she kept track of coupons she redeemed at supermarkets, so that at the end of each year she could add up how much money she had saved. In a small notebook that she hid inside her library book as she sat on the porch, she documented the comings and goings in the neighborhood, including license numbers of cars, in case any crimes were being committed and the police might want to know. As a keeper of notebooks myself, I found her exemplary.

In due time she died, an event for which she was fully prepared. She had tagged all her belongings for distribution to her heirs and assembled her burial outfit right down to clean new underwear. At her viewing, as I contemplated her mortal remains laid out just as she had instructed, her daughter stood beside me at the casket and asked me in a low voice, “Did you know Mom kept a notebook of her bowel movements?”

No, I hadn’t known. But although I was so amused it was hard for me to maintain a funereal demeanor, I was not surprised. I already knew she was, uh, retentive. The notebooks a person keeps reveal a lot.

What would mine reveal about me? I still have a childhood notebook in which I listed bird sightings, horses I saw from the school bus, books I read, and new words I liked. Now I keep a separate vocabulary tome that is far more than just a word list; it reflects my peculiar personal taste. (Eructation: the fancy word for “burp.”) Bird sightings are now less important to me than the hubby journals I keep almost as obsessively as I kept baby books when my children were small. Kids say the cutest things, and so does Jaime, for instance with a Chilean description of dumbidity: “We leave him to guard the turtles and they all run away.” Or, of humiliation: “I swallow the frog.”

I have notebooks researching books I’ve written – the “bible” for Enola Holmes is massive. Then there are notebooks in which I collect lists of things -- bumper stickers, bad jokes, awful lawn ornaments, euphemisms for mental incompetence, some of the more bizarre insults of menopause. And I have notebooks detailing places I’ve lived or visited. For instance, where I live now, the mailboxes are backwards, facing away from the road. And a lot of the souped up pickup trucks have whip antennas with balls on them – tennis balls. And a vehicle’s rear window is likely to bear a formal dedication to some deceased person, every bit as serious as a gravestone. The actual graves, in the cemeteries, are covered with slabs to keep varmints out, and the slabs function like coffee tables for the display of doodads in honor of whoever’s underneath.

I keep so many notebooks that sometimes I forget them and rediscover them, as I recently found a journal dedicated to dreams, which reveals mostly how much I can’t remember after I wake up. Also I found a forgotten notebook for wishes. (“I wish I had a kayak!”) And my old poetry journals. For some quirky reason, when I complete a poem, I must inscribe it longhand, preferably in some oddball color of ink. Heck, I scribble rainbows in all my notebooks.

I think my favorite poetry notebook is the Poetry in Motion one. Some way, someday, I’m going to have a blocky car with a poetic license on which I will paint all my favorite quotes. “Turning and turning in the widening gyres” will be depicted as a spiral on the roof, and amid many serious snippets from Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Tennyson, Whitman and others, I will include “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater is trochaic tetrameter.” But until I get the car, my plans are in the notebook.

I recently stocked up on some irresistible mini-notebooks from doverpublications.com, specifically the ones with Van Gogh or Monet covers. I don’t need them. I have accumulated enough unused and partially-used notebooks to last me for the rest of my natural existence. Yet I bought more. Go figure.

So what do my myriad notebooks and journals reveal about me? Honestly, I can’t tell. I’m too close; all those colorful pages prevent me from seeing the plot line. But I’m pretty sure that, after I’m gone, mine will make better reading than my elderly neighbor’s did.