The Notebooks

I went out and bought two or three of these notebooks - probably just before my 59th birthday.

I used to write in “journals” off and on for years - somewhere out there in the barn/workshop there’s a box full of those hard-bound-book type things. Some fancy, some plain. I guess they appealed to a part of me that thought writing stuff down needed to look serious. Most of them aren’t even 1/4 full.

Around eight years ago I fell in with a group of local musicians - some were songwriters, some singers and players. I have always loved music - there was a grand piano in our living room when I was a kid. My two older sisters got piano lessons that they did not like - I did not get the lessons but my mother used to say that I made musical-sounding things on that piano.

I bought my first guitar at 13 - I was enthralled with the 60’s Folk scene.

Anyway - the notebooks. I have been earning a living doing carpentry for about forty years now. At this point I don’t have to think real hard to get the work done. I also work alone often and the internal dialogue just runs on and on. When I got a computer I naturally started keeping little online notebooks. Falling back into music via the friends that I had found, I began to channel my internal dialogues into paper notes during the day. Scribblings that I was hoping were song-like ideas. I began to amass pockets full of scrap paper. I wrote on the backs of receipts, my appointment books - that kind of thing. So that day came when I went to Office Depot in Rio Grande and bought a couple of black & white composition books - and one orange one on a whim. I intended to proceed in an orderly fashion and work in one until it was filled up before starting in the next one. That probably didn’t last very long. Being lazy by nature I would eventually just grab whichever one was nearby and so at this point the chronology of the scribblings is totally out of whack. 

I think I also liked the idea that buying those notebooks seemed to indicate the serious intent that I had bent myself to. So I bought more before any were filled up. 

I page back through them from time to time - I see the same ideas presented and re-presented. It has led me to think that there are a half-dozen or so issues that concern most of us. I’m often surprised to see how long ago an idea that I think of as recent was initially written down.

There might be five or six currently working - I think there are two that are filled. The orange one is faded to a pale ochre.

I managed to lose track of one a couple of years ago. Actually, I didn’t lose track of it - I lost it.

I dropped it in the driveway of The Mad Batter Bar & Restaurant during one of the SS Cape May conferences. I didn’t even miss it. One night last year I was at The Batter to hear Dan Barry play. His bass player Dominic Mancini came up to me and handed me the notebook that he’d found back then. I didn’t recognize it at first when he handed me that notebook - then I saw the black “3” on the cover. Apparently I had numbered them once before the scheme got out of whack. As I said, I see the same themes coming up over and over, but sometimes in between all the negligible scrawls there are a few keepers.