Just because we cannot know what was in the mind of the person doodling across this page, the evidence of her life resonates years later.
While doing some re-organizing, my wife recently opened a book that hasn’t moved for years since it was placed on its shelf. Inside she discovered a piece of paper that my mother had apparently folded between its pages 40 years prior. Scrawled on this thin time capsule, including a hastily scribed date at the top corner, there are notes. We pour over them like runes found at an archaeological site. Some are amusing, some simply mysterious, some irrelevant. Some are illegible. None of them amount to very much, yet no matter how we discuss and consider and laugh and ruminate about what’s there, that page of handwritten script becomes almost impossible to discard. It has a crease down the middle and it’s smudged, with a ragged edge where it was apparently torn from a spiral note pad. It has a little doodle of bulbous leaves on a vine that often found its way into the margins of her pages. It contains no real meaning, no information of any discernible value, save for one thing. It is a physical link to the past. It is a tangible artifact, proving that things happened decades ago. It means nothing, and yet it strangely means everything.
Was it placed in those pages as a hasty bookmark? Does it amount to a jotted collection of notes not to forget, inadvertently lost to approaching decades when the phone rang, or she had to leave for work, or my sister or I burst through the door after school? There are no clues to clarify these mysteries. My mother cannot recall either; it’s just a page of random scribblings with a smattering of words and loopy doodles that don’t amount to much.
Intellectually I realize that events of all sorts happened in the past. Events of the past shape our endlessly evolving present. Like all of us, my mother jotted professional notes, scrawled grocery lists, scribbled phone numbers, and captured thoughts she wanted to recall later. Of course, she also wrote more substantial things beyond this largely unintelligible page. Like billions of other people she produced expressions of influence at different times and for different purposes with varying degrees of meaning and feeling and sentimental value and critical importance, some profound, some less so.
That’s why this scrap of paper and ink captures my imagination. Here’s an encapsulation of an ordinary moment, apparently compiled in haste or in an incremental process of additive notation. Its relative vacuity describes the majority of our lives, the big masses of interstitial goo that hold our more substantial bones together. Most of our days do not concern works of creative flight. Most of our days are about getting the laundry folded, and dreaming about works of creative flight we’d like to be doing instead.
That’s also why this document, previously lost to anonymous pages of a forgotten book, transported through time without explanation, matters to me. It reminds me that most of the stuff we create in our fleeting years on Earth are probably more akin to this scrap of memory than anything genuinely memorable or substantive. Collectively we all remember the polished and refined stuff. But where our best creative works are usually efforts of deliberate intention, they only represent a small portion of the expended creative energy we all use to get us from day to day.
On the right side of that page, her doodled leaves suggest that she was thinking about or listening to something else while she was holding her pen. I imagine that something else was happening simultaneously, an automated hold-message on the phone, or a moment marking time while waiting for someone in the house to return to an interrupted conversation. The specifics of those experiences are now lost to time, but the scribbled, recorded evidence of those ordinary moments, captured like a mote in amber, provokes me to ponder the origin of any lasting idea.