The Seven Stages of Moleskine

The moment I realized my moleskine notebook was missing was not a moment of panic or terror. I did not understand at that time how significant the loss of a notebook could be. I was simply leaving a darkened theater, and what I wanted to think about much more than a small black book was the beauty and sadness of Pan’s Labyrinth, the snow falling outside, and the girl who had been sitting next to me in the theater. The notebook was insignificant.

Still, I walked back up to the row where we had been sitting, and Drea held her cellphone under the seats for light. I had not kept track of exactly which seat my coat had been on, so we looked under three or four seats, found nothing, and left the theater. I put it out of my mind.

The next night, I decided to look around my room. That notebook tended to fall out of my coat pocket whenever I threw my coat on the bed (or floor,) so I decided it was possible I simply hadn’t noticed its absence until leaving the theater. I’m kind of an absent-minded slob, and things happen. Of course, it wasn’t in my room, either, and midway through searching, I realized something.

I was going to have to grieve the loss of this notebook.

Most people probably won’t understand why this is necessary, and at first I also tried to deny it. I try to take a non-materialist stance toward life. I want to own things without them owning me, and the loss of “stuff” shouldn’t be that affecting. After all, most of this notebook was filled with grocery lists. A few pages, though, were completely irreplaceable. For instance, I had written down a continual stream of thoughts during my trip to California last spring. Very little of it would interest anyone else, but for me it was almost the equivalent of a photo album. I’m a verbal person, and the snapshots that matter most to me are those memories that I write down, and those lame, spontaneous “poems” like one that I wrote during a drive through some cattle country and have here recreated from memory:

Cows in the road,
Moo-oo-oove!
Your udders want to be emptied
But I want to be in
San Francisco.

Probably no one else wants to read that, but to me it conjures up a very clear, detailed memory of some cows crossing the road in front of me on my way back from the lighthouse at Point Reyes. I can see the grass, the gray sky, and the deteriorating road where the cows trampled it every day. Up until now, whenever a memory like that has seemed distant or faded, I could pull the notebook out of my coat pocket and refresh myself. It was my recent history. So, if you find a notebook with a few dumb haikus and a poem about cows crossing the road, please… send it home.