Illegible Evidence

We get mail.

“when you’re lucky enough to get to be the son of a reporter, you carry your share of peculiar memories around to discover much later. anything at anytime can jar one loose. it’s akin to a long game of hide and seek you didn’t even know you were playing. today’s example: my pops was more anchorman than he was newspaperman in the 70s and 80s. he had what was once known as a reporter’s notebook. and he didn’t just have one – he had many, so so many, seemingly in the hundreds. he carried at least one from assignment to assignment, usually in a back pocket. people of a certain age (or of a certain profession) will recall these oddities, I think, and chances are newsrooms still have them. but for the rest of the crowd, just picture a long rectangular notebook, spiral bound at the top, created in such a way that you could write very fast on short lines. once you filled it up, you simply flipped around to its backside, using the other sides of pages. viewed that way, it was like having two notebooks in one. they were made specifically for these men and women who quickly recorded news stories as they unfolded in real time, scribbling down quotes as fast as hands could go, well before miniature tape recorders and cell phones took over as convenient advances and made everyone a lot lazier. it was common to find these notebooks throughout the houses I was raised in, usually stuffed into catch-all drawers. I’d say it was like finding hidden treasure, but they were everywhere. they were common. and opening one up meant seeing mostly-filled pages that I couldn’t comprehend, not even after trying (and often). it looked not unlike the evidence of a man who was a little out of his mind. dad was a lefty like his father, so he had that strong claw of a scrawl, amounting to a death grip on his pen as he took his notes. and I don’t think he ever threw the notebooks out. maybe it didn’t make sense to do so. maybe he felt he’d need to refer to one later. maybe drawers were his take on filing cabinets (and if that’s true, our organization skills matched one another just fine). for years after he passed, the notebooks still surfaced as mostly illegible evidence that he existed for long chunk of time, trying to recall all that was said, and trying like mad to be a better version of the reporter he was. Field Notes is selling their version of a reporter’s notebook right now. they were very responsible for this ramble, this string of memories, this filling up of the white space I often like to do. I already scooped one of those notebooks up this morning (as if I had any real choice in the matter).” 

Thanks for the note Dainon.