Several years ago I started carrying moleskine notebooks in my hip pocket. They’re the perfect size to pack and load, just like an iPod. (I’m running out of hip pockets.) Portable and transportable, sturdy and solid, moleskines do look “like the kind of thing that holds interesting, and possibly important, jottings.” They have a cult following.
Soon thereafter I started misplacing them them, quite consistently, and beginning new ones before finding and filling the old. I’m not one of those meticulous journal-keepers like Thoreau or Michael Palin or my step-Mom, with a shelf of precisely-dated and ordered entries mirroring the years.
It’s more interesting this way. Eventually the old notebooks always resurface, from whatever corner or closet or drawer they’ve been submerged in, and the cycle repeats. It’s been repeating for a while now.
Yesterday I filled the last page of a notebook and went rummaging for another. I dug up one whose first entry is from 2000, and then skips to 2005, then to 2007. If I don’t lose it over the next six months– a big if– it’ll span the decade. Cool.
One of the entries records the day five years ago when Younger Daughter astonished
herself and me by falling in with the ducks, literally, at Centennial Park. Another notches the happier, mostly-drier day we brought her puppy home. There are many “kids say the darndest things” entries (R.I.P., Mr. Linkletter) like “Mom, do people have to get married? I don’t want to get stuck with some boy!
Somewhere, probably in the hot and cluttered Little House attic, there are older notebooks to embarrass Older Daughter, too. Stay tuned.
Up@dawn 
June 19, 2010 at 9:35 am |
I was in England a few years ago and reading one of my favorite writers, the late great Bruce Chatwin. In a collection of his essays or somewhere he comments that he needs to stock up on Moleskines for a journey he was heading out on. Seeking the perfect journal and assuming my hero Chatwin had already done the heavy lifting, I ran to the local stationery store only to learn that the journals had gone out of business a few years previously. Imagine my delight, fast forwarding through the years, to discover that phoenix-like the Moleskine emerges. And not only emerges, but becomes an industry, prompting knock-offs and wanna-bees. Long live the Moleskine.