Morning reading: The ink-stained notebooks of a complicated person

Adam shares an excerpt about the aesthetics of an old notebook and the complications in its pages.

Debra Kaminsky writes about finding her disappointing father’s travel journals after he died. I did not find it a happy article but I think it’s a good reminder that a notebook can be used to appreciate what you have.

You push memories into categories and organize life’s artifacts into boxes. Some go to Goodwill. Some are tucked into a drawer or a garage. And some, like the weathered, ink-stained notebooks I extracted from a trunk in my father’s closet a few days after he died, become an air hole in the suffocating sadness, and an opportunity to see a complicated person in a new light.

The first notebook I found was bound in soft leather, its pages thick with theater tickets, clipped restaurant menus, and even the odd hotel key carefully glued inside. I had been wading through piles of my dad’s jeans and forgotten neckties—death, in all its finality, kicks off an endless to-do list of quotidian donkey work—when it called to me.

Inside, the first time-stamped entry read: “Sunday evening, Jan. 18, 1998,” and then, like a dateline for one of his early pieces in The New York Times, “NEW YORK CITY.”