I take notes when someone is talking. It’s a compulsion, a nervous tic, a thing to keep my worried fingers moving, scribbling on the backs of receipts or on the junk mail I’ve stuffed in my purse. I rarely do anything with this writing. It ends up back in my purse, and then, every few weeks I empty out my purse and chuck the crumpled notes in the recycling bin.
I used to carry around a little notebook because I’d read somewhere that all writers should carry around a little notebook. In it I would write snippets of potential story scenes and oddball thoughts that popped into my head and conversations I shamelessly eavesdropped on.
For example, in March 2008, I was sitting at the Panera Bread in Columbus, Ohio, and I overheard a woman at a nearby table say to another: “Dad said some magic words to me. And the magic words were: What are you going to do with your luggage?”
[What does this mean? I wondered in March 2008, and I wonder, again, now.]
The other day someone was talking at a meeting, and I was taking notes furiously—furiously in the sense that I was trying to keep up with what the person was saying, but also, because I was furious about what she was saying, which basically boiled down to Things Are Really Bad Right Now.
After the meeting I scrunched up the paper I’d been taking notes on and drove home in tears. If I don’t write things down, I will forget them. If I write things down, but don’t read what I’ve written, I can also forget. It’s a nifty trick. Too bad I can’t always manage to remember it.
I have so many questions about what I hear, what I write. The woman at the Panera Bread. I mean, what the hell was she going to do with her luggage? And at the meeting the other day. Instead of telling us how crappy things are, why can’t someone help us figure out what to do about it?
Maybe I am asking for too much. Maybe there are no magic words. Still, I find myself writing it all down. Friday at the library, a toddler shows me her coloring page. It’s covered in crayon scribbles and I love it. When she offers it to me, I take it.
One writer to another. No words, but I know exactly what she means.
