Almost everyone these days seems to need an appointment
book to organize their days. These come in all sizes and
colours and are purportedly capable of giving you thirty-six
hours worth of time every day. I suspect that twelve of
these are used in making notes in the book, but how should
I know, mine is only three by five and fits into my shirt
pocket. No matter what size or shape you prefer, something
terminal happens at the end of the year. Every 31 Dec. or
thereabouts I go through my little pocket note book and
extract the good parts before I put it away in storage forever.
It's an interesting experience, sifting through the detritus
of a whole year and finding it reduced to little truncated
bits. Those telephone numbers circled and underlined with
urgent exclamation points beside them, whose were they anyway?
Those cramped little reminders, what were they supposed
to make me remember. Here's a note that says, "R blindness".
What am I supposed to make of that? Maybe, if I recall correctly,
it's about the fact that items put into a fridge by women
can never be found by men. Yes, that's it, "refigerator
blindness." I must have intended to do a paragraph
on the subject, but somehow it fell between the cracks.
Some entries are easier to decipher. Here's a note in June
when I was in Victoria. It says "Father's asleep."
That was to remind me of a line I can use at the next party
I'm invited to. "I want to die peacefully in my sleep
like my father, not screaming in terror like his passengers."
I picked that up in June and I haven't yet been invited
to a party where I can use it. I wonder if those two facts
are connected somehow.
In the back pages there are some longer notes. It seems
I met a lady from California while standing in a line-up
at the St. John's airport. She comes every year to see relatives
and takes back blueberries. Her brother built a duplex that
looks out on the beach where she played as a child, but
now, she says, even the rocks look different, and everybody
works for the government. There's a novel somewhere in those
last two sentences, too bad I didn't have a bigger note
book at the time.
There was one more entry that stands out. It was a quote
from a government man at a Newfoundland Mining Conference.
It says "parameterization, topology, geometry, and
property manipulation." Picking blueberries for ladies
from California would have made a lot more sense.
Bluebox ©2001 Don Cox
Website ©2001 OttawaWEB
