Spitball Army

This is my sorry tale of woe.

It has been raining here since Friday night.  It is now Tuesday morning.  This area sorely needs the rain, and this rain has been ideal – a slow and steady rain, but never a deluge.  At this time next week, my neighborhood will be ten shades of green.  But, today, as I walked across the back lawn to my office hideaway, the soil underneath the grass groaned and moved beneath my feet, sounding like an old man breaking wind.

I opened the office door and flipped on the lights.  The top of the desk was cleared.  Each of the drawers was opened an inch or two.  In the corner of the room, glaring at me with an immobile pigheadedness, was the collection of papers and magazines that I had piled up while in my frantic search last night.  I surveyed the room once more for any possible nook or cranny that I may have overlooked during my raid.

For, you see, I have lost my notebook.

This was not just any notebook, not one of the many black-and-white composition books that are scattered around my house, pen attached, waiting to have a thought scribbled in it before the thought flies from my head altogether.  No, this was my daily book.  The one that I rely on.  The one I use the most.  The one that contains all of the good stuff.

It is brown, with a leather binding and thick brown cloth on the front and back panels.  It securely holds a wire-bound pad, with lined, perforated pages.  It has pockets behind both the front and back covers that can store notes and small documents.  It even has an elegant brown ribbon that marks a place in the pad that I might want to access with ease.

This book travels with me. It went with me on a long weekend trip to Cambridge last Fall. It frequently accompanies me to a local coffeehouse.  Most recently, it made the cross-country journey with me to southern California, where I attended my 30th high school reunion, and visited family and places from my past.

As fine and as comfortable as this notebook is – and it is nothing if not comfortable, both in my hand and to the eye – it is not the object I am distraught about losing as much as what is contained within it.

When I travel – and travel is not something that I do frequently – I like to journal in this book.  I journaled my Cambridge trip, and eventually translated the scribblings to posts on this weblog (see “Cambridge Journal” in the sidebar tag cluster).  I had just outlined extensive notes on my California expedition – “outlined” because so much happened on that trip that it would have taken days to write it all out in sentences.  I had planned to eventually flesh out those notes into more rhapsodic language.  I was composing Thank You notes to acknowledge several kindnesses from this recent trip.  These notes and the recipients’ mailing addresses were in the notebook, along with a small bundle of postage stamps.  Hotel and restaurant receipts were in the cover pockets, along with several postcards and a few business cards.  My name tags from the reunion events (“Hello, My Name Is”) were stickered inside the back cover.  A small cache of my personal stationery was stashed in the back cover pocket, my name and home address printed on the envelopes.

How could this notebook have just vanished into thin air?  I have traced and retraced my steps over the last few days.  I have turned the house and office upside down looking for it.  I went to both local post offices, where I had delivered tubs of mail recently, thinking that I might have placed the notebook in the tub inadvertently.  In fact, I distinctly remember doing this sometime in the last week, but am having a hard time accessing a memory of pulling the book out of the tub.  As expected, the staff at the Irondale post office shared my concern and took my phone numbers, while the people at the downtown Birmingham branch didn’t want to be bothered.  If the notebook did show up in one of these places, it would be easy to locate me, as the pages are filled with detailed personal information (including my name and address, and God knows what else).  Perhaps someone at the P.O. will rescue it and, in a rare moment of sparkling humanity, return it to me in the mail.

But I can’t hold out hope that this will happen.  What is a dear treasure to me is likely going to be seen by someone else as a bunch of random scribblings on paper.  They are more apt to toss it in the trash than think empathetically.  Maybe my misfortune is a “message,” telling me that I need to work without notes.  Could that be?  God, I hope not.  I feel that same helplessness that Samson must have felt once shorn of his seven locks of hair.  I tried to recreate some of the book’s content from memory this morning, and I had a paper jam in my head.  It didn’t help that I am going through a carb-detox period with its attendant headaches.  The accompanying scowl has spread from my face right into my brain, blocking coherent thought processes.

It really does hurt to think.