After 40-odd years in the newspaper trade, I have learned (or should have) never to go anywhere without a notebook or a camera. If you do, the best interview of your life will walk in the door, or a UFO will land on your lawn.
You would think I had learned this lesson by now, missing a million great stories. I haven’t seen that UFO yet, but my smart phone will fill in for a camera, just as long as I remember to keep it charged.
I have more notebooks than you have ever dreamed of possessing. I have notebooks from the Newseum, natch, and the Guggenheim Museum. On the rare occasions I attend a museum (rainy Sundays), I always check the gift shop and the stationery shop. The Guggenheim has the best notebooks so far, just the right size with stiff covers that fold into mark your page. But the Newseum notebooks are close behind, complete with a keyboard illustration on each cover. On my trip to the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, I bought a notebook that is much too large unless I have a desk nearby. But it is big enough to sketch the Great American Novel, when I can find the time. I even have an official police notebook donated by Rockland police Chief Al Ockenfels on his retirement. Much too small for anything but “Just the facts, ma’am.”
A CVS memo book is almost as small, but useable. I even have a Staples notebook, just to show that I am not a notebook snob.
Naturally, I have several official newspaper reporter’s notebooks, which are guarded jealously. They are so precious that I hate to use them. Crazy, huh?
Last week, I found myself naked (in the journalistic sense) in the North Woods without a suitable notebook and a cell phone-camera that had died. With no notebook and no camera, I was sure a UFO would land on the lake. I would have to rely on … my memory.
It has been so long since I have spent time with my memory I forget what it looks like.
I stole a pristine envelope from the car of Jefferson Phil and did what I could. At least I remembered a pen. The notes were close to undecipherable, but I managed. The thoughts come by so seldom these days, I have to write them down immediately.
When I returned home, I sounded like Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind.” I said out loud “As God is my witness, I will never be without a notebook again.”
The first thing was to connect online with my favorite cultural organization, the Newseum. After several tries, I could not get them to admit that they ever sold reporter’s notebooks, let alone had any in stock. Same with the Guggenheim. It was just as well. In my notebook panic, I would have purchased at least a half-dozen. My personal mania ranks right up there with flashlights and hunting knives. You cannot have enough.
Then I looked around.
I had two reporter’s notebooks in my desk. I had a pristine Guggenheim model I had been saving for a special occasion, like the end of the world. I had a Newseum model, only half filled. When I went to the Honda Accord, I had two more beauties in the console. One used for gas mileage, but still. When I opened the glove compartment for my car registration, there were two more waiting for me. I fished in the compartment in the back of the seat — one big notebook, like the Dali Museum model and a small one for dire emergencies.
I decided to forego any more notebook purchases, at least for the moment.
During a weekend notebook discussion with occasional columnist David Grima (he claims he lives in cement towers, so I never read him) I expressed my theory that you simply cannot have enough notebooks. Like the National Rifle Association says about guns, it’s better to have one and not need it than need it and not have it.
Grima demurred. He said there is deep danger in having any more than one notebook. He keeps his personal notebook close to his breast at all times. No news on whether he sleeps with it.
“Once you write it down and put it down, you have to search through all the notebooks later to see what was so important,” the British immigrant said.
If you have 15 notebooks (I do), you have to look through all of them to find those pearls of wisdom you have already forgotten, he said. It’s hard enough to find one notebook, he argued.
I don’t care. I may order a few more, just in case. You never know. It’s better to have one and not need it than …
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the Bangor Daily News in Rockland for 30 years.