My desk has eluded organization for months—or years, depending on how I measure it. Along with a couple of unsent Christmas cards, a 2011 plant catalogue and three mix tapes with which I can't bear to part even though I no longer own the technology to play them, my latest attempt unearthed a pile of loose papers.---
A barely legible note is scrawled on each scrap—legal-pad half-sheets, Post-It notes, two corners torn from a notebook, a strip of orange construction paper. I clearly wrote them quickly, using a weird shorthand, trying to record some little thing that Theo or Sylvia said or did.
I have kept a Theo journal—and then a Theo & Sylvia journal—since Theo was born nearly five years ago. My entries have been irregular at best, and I've often laid awake at night vainly straining to remember that funny thing that I meant to write down so I wouldn't forget it.
I would like to keep my notes scrawled on their little paper pieces. The remnants are telling: something said during a construction-paper project, an observation made on the grocery list in the store, notes from a bedtime jotted on a paisley notepad I wanted to use up because I thought it was ugly but wouldn't just throw away.
The art-project part of me wants to collect these in a rough-edged, shape-shifting journal with some sort of hand-sewn binding, or at least glue them artfully into a sketchbook. The realist in me knows this will never happen, that the scraps will get lost and, if I let too much time pass, that I'll forget my on-the-spot shorthand and have no idea what happened during my children's childhoods.
Practicality triumphs, and I eventually transcribe the fragments into a Word document that I periodically email to myself so it won't get lost when my computer crashes. As much as I love refinding my notes-of-times-past around the house, I am scared of losing them. Also, the only people who may be interested in reading the Theo & Sylvia journal are Theo and Sylvia, and it seems discourteous to ask them to decipher illegible notes about themselves 30 years from now.
It's still fun to find the paper scraps, though. I'm a fan of ephemera, and self-referential ephemera is, of course, poignant. Rummaging through a drawer at my parents' house last spring, I found an old piece of notebook paper listing songs for mix tapes I was making for high-school friends. The tapes on my desk that I can't throw away are from this era, and this is why I love them.
Each playlist is a journal of a sort, or a letter. As a compilation of others' words and music, a mix can communicate with a clarity that overreaches the compiler's language. They can be oracular, metaphorical, over-interpreted or totally un-construed. I combed a gift-tape's inclusion of U2's "With Or Without You" for clues to a high-school romance. I still think a friend's addition of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" in another gift was just because he happened to like the song, right? Because for all the emotional weight a playlist might carry, it also could be just a run of good songs.
Like observational journal entries, remembered songs can convey whole experiences. Simply reading a playlist, not to mention hearing the songs, brings up the way it felt to drive around in the 1980s and 90s, hang out with a friend's tape/CD player, or walk around with a Walkman. Songs are seriously associative. The parenting advice of a friend with a teenager is this: Listen to your kids' music with them.
I don't know what my kids' musical tastes will be. The playlist I keep for them now—on iTunes—is a varied collection of songs my husband and I like, that we listened to as kids, or that convey something of what we feel about having our own children. I suppose it is a kind of a companion piece to my Theo & Sylvia journal.
One of the journal notes in my current pile says: "Drvng hm w/mud T + S. Cresc Mn radio. Erly twilt, invinc., there's shift!"
This is what it remembers: Theo, Sylvia and I went to Tesuque Creek one evening a few weeks ago after a day of not leaving the house. When 5:30 rolled around, some sort of outing became a psychological imperative. So, we joined friends near the trailhead, where our kids got soaked and muddy in the creek and we drank beer while spoon-feeding them leftover soup and cheese as they ran by.
The light was dimming when we loaded up and drove home again, and as I crested a hill, The Waterboys' "The Whole of The Moon" came on the radio. Although this song was recorded in 1985, I associate it with high school and college. (I've never really been on the musical vanguard.) I turned it up louder.
A sunset smoldered saffron over the Jemez Mountains, but the rest of the sky was muting blue with watery pink clouds. It was just the time of early night that jives with young adulthood in a way that makes you feel invincible and ageless, especially when you're driving with friends and the windows are down with the evening cool rushing in and the radio blaring.
Except this time I was alone with my children strapped in the backseat, their presence confirming that I am neither invincible nor ageless. There was a strange disconnect in this fusion of life stages, and also a sort of suspended magic held in the song's duration. I wonder now whether this moment belongs in the Theo & Sylvia journal or in the notebook I keep for myself, whether it's part of my playlist or theirs.
