Typing this from a cozy Brooklyn apartment. A cat paw keeps reaching beneath the screen to help me type.
(I was going to snap a shot of the paw reaching for my typing fingers, but ever so like a cat, he refuses documentation.)
Landed here late morning, after two days in Manhattan. Some business meetings, then I spent yesterday walking the upper west side. A few hours, nothing much. My agent said I’d like Zabar’s the famous deli/grocery, so I headed up Broadway to check it out. Bought a bagel next door, too, and walked over to the park and south. Enjoyable and unremarkable. I am really ready to be home for awhile.
But first a visit with Boy #1 and his girlfriend and their menagerie of cats (who are still sticking paws out to catch my typing fingers) because I’ve missed them madly. On the way here, I took a taxi and had to look up my son’s address in the back-up notebook I carried through Italy (I know, I know–why did I bring it with me??) and LEFT IT IN THE CAB.
I shrugged it off the first time, but this one has left a big hole in the middle of my chest. I seriously, seriously hate that I’ve lost two notebooks in a month. Important notebooks, packed with observations and sketches and details of my travels.
I do have to ask what I am meant to learn from these two, back-to-back losses. Am I meant to live more in the moment? To rely on memory (sensation, a mood, a taste, a sense of things) instead of documents when thinking about my travels? Is the universe trying to tell me to stay home and just write? Or am I just scattered and need a better system?
Again, my address is inside the notebook, along with two others. Perhaps the notebook will show up at one of them. I fervently hope so. I’m visualizing the BOTH showing up.
And if the God is trying to tell me something, perhaps she will write in down and tuck it inside the notebook.
Do any of you lose things? Or have you gone through stages when you lost important things?
I come from Australia. We do a good atheism down here, so I never use the word god in relation to these sort of things.
But Freud (now I do believe in Freud and many of his derivatives) said that there was no such thing as an accident!
I regard it as a bit of a gift when things like this happen. Something is going on, and a bit of internal detective work could be in order.
And only you can know what that is.
True, Christine. I’m not sure I believe in accidents, either, and two notebooks in a row is too weird.
But as a spiritual being, I do believe that the universe can use anything, so if the notebooks can’t come back, perhaps something in one will be a blessing to someone.
I’m remembering Hemingway’s wife losing ALL of his writing in that suitcase–the story from A Moveable Feast, which I only read because you recommended it, but ended up loving.
I’m wondering if there’s a way these two notebook losses fit into the current puzzle you’re trying to configure in your new novel?
Hope they come back to you.
Cindy, I’m so glad you read A Movable Feast! And that’s an intriguing idea, the new novel. Which is a big tangle of things I haven’t yet sorted out. Lost things. Lost things….