National Notebook Day

I have loved notebooks since I was very little. I loved the clean, blank pages and I loved filling them up! I pretty much scribbled anything and everything down if it came into my head. I read Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy when it came out in 1964, and I knew I had found my spiritual sister in Harriet. Her notebook got her into trouble, but I knew exactly where she was coming from. To this day, my closet is packed with boxes of old notebooks.

I have another sentimental reason for loving notebooks. My dad had a World War II army buddy named George Roth who was the president of Spiral Binding Company, makers of spiral-bound notebooks. George was a lovely guy who I got to meet when I was a kid. He had invented a character named Whispering Jack Smith who supposedly was in the same army unit as my dad and George, and who could not speak above a whisper. In order to get his three rambunctious young sons to quiet down before bedtime, George would tell stories about the wartime exploits of their buddy the same way Jack Smith talked—in a whisper. My dad cribbed the idea from George, so my brother and I got to hear some of the made-up adventures of his hapless, and fictitious, army pal, as told by my dad.

To writers, notebooks imply stories! I suppose to some people they imply lists and tasks and accounts. That just tells you how versatile and useful they are, and how worthy of celebration.