I often think about an old notebook my friend Diana loaned me decades ago, the journal of a man, long deceased, containing notes in pencil for almost every day between September 1950 and December 1952.
The entries placed weather statistics and baseball scores side-by-side with phrases about marriages, anniversaries, election results, births, deaths, fishing and digging for worms. I assume that some of these things were more important to him than others, but the journal gives no clues.
Now I am partial to list makers and journal keepers. And sometimes I wonder if their notes are really filled with secret codes that hide feelings behind simple, ordinary statements. Believing that no one writes down an insignificant event, and that recording one event is really about recording something else, I look for clues in the author’s journal. But his purpose is as hidden in his lines as the reasons for his selection of apparently unconnected events.
My own memories often imitate the author’s apparently random entries. Those memories appear and disappear and are mixed up like the entries in the journal Diana gave me, sometimes thoughts about death and about flowers and about childhood and about children and about the very best love of all and the time I got caught cheating on my French test in 1956.
Instead of writing those things down, I choose to count the number of flowers in bloom today and the time the crows wake in the morning and when the crickets sing in the alley near my house.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the third week of early fall. In the meantime, if you wrote down things, what would YOU write?
