“It’s okay,” a guy tells his dog. “It’s all right, buddy.”

“Is everyone feeling weird today?” another man asks him.

“It’s the atmosphere,” the dog guy says.

“What does that mean?”

“We’re victims of the chem trails in the sky.”

That’s something I wrote in one of the notebooks I always carry. Sometimes I use the notes function on my phone, but I’ve been carrying notebooks for so long that I prefer them. I probably leaned against a lamppost, trying to look casual. I was almost home, walking along a residential street. At other times, if things are a little more tense, I can disappear around corners—even into washrooms—to scribble things down.

Because who can make this stuff up? And what writer doesn’t need details?

***

Robert Louis Stephenson carried a notebook. In fact, he’s quoted in a biography by Camille Peri as saying he always carried two books—one to write in and one to read. 

“Thus I lived with words,” Stephenson said. “Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to anyone with senses there is always something worth describing.”

Peri’s book is called The Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stephenson. In it, she also writes that Mary Shelley kept the heart of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley for thirty years after his death. It had been plucked by his friend Edward Trelawney from the funeral pyre in which Shelley was being cremated.

At least, she thought it was his heart.

“Cremation experts considered that the liver was most likely to have survived the fire,” Peri writes. “She kept it wrapped in Shelley’s final poem, Adonais.”

This particular notebook is full, but I carried it for a couple of years in my backpack or pocket. I also kept it handy as I read, never knowing when I might stumble on a detail that could prove useful. A drone I saw not long ago has already made it into the novel I’m working on. (It’s also in one of these posts, although I left out a couple of details I found useful in my novel. Sorry.)

I’ve harvested other details from my little black book, jotting them down in my journal, and now I’m going to archive it. But first, a few more random scribblings.

One is a note about Karen Blixen—the writer Isak Dinesen—as she’s portrayed in a biography by Judith Thurman.

“What really appalled her, when she took stock of it, was the feeling that her own life was a failure, that she had squandered the passion and talent she had started out with and that she had unconsciously wanted a child to make up the deficit. This was precisely how her mother had ‘lived through’ her. and how (her grandmother) had lived through her own five children. It was a chain of dependence, well-meaning and ignoble, which she has so despised and suffered from and now stood ready to perpetuate with the next generation.”

***

Next, a quote from the novel A Wren, A Wren by Anne Enright, whose protagonist has just had a child:

“Because birth was not the end of pregnancy, she thought, it was just pregnancy externalized.”

The protagonist is the novel I’m writing is pregnant, so I went through a pregnancy phase in my notebook. There are more quotes, but I’ll jump to a section from the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver on the campus of the University of B.C. I was doing some fairly specific research, but the displays were so fascinating I couldn’t stop taking notes.

“In 1883, William Flowers suggested that whales are more closely related to goats, pigs, zebras and other hoofed animals than they are to fish. (Later confirmed.)”

“Big game hunters want trophy animals of impressive size, so they go after vigorous young males, skewing the genetics. Over three decades in the 20^th century, the body and horn size of bighorn sheep declined by 20 per cent.”

“Red raspberry leaves are harvested after the first frost by the women of the Squamish nation to make a tea for women’s health issues. The tea is used to treat the symptoms of menstrual pain and to shorten childbirth, since it strengthens the uterus.”

***

The museum also offered a display curated by Vancouver artist Greg Snider called Two Pack Rats, containing two quite wonderful cases of artifacts.

About the first, he writes:

“In the mid-80s, while renovating a house on Yale Street in East Vancouver, I discovered a mixed collection of nearly 200 random household objects nestled inside some basement duct-work, an eclectic assortment of small things collected from the house and brought there, presumably, by a pack rat. Some could be dated to the mid-1950s or early 60s, (coins, pencils with 4-digit phone numbers, business names.) This meant the collection had been there for 30 or 40 years before it was found. Since pack rats do not live long, the collecting was a kind of domestic Vancouver time capsule. The contents were carefully removed and put into a plastic bag, sealed up, and set aside–it seemed an unusual enough find to preserve. Everything on this first table is that collection.”

The second contains objects Snider collected himself.

“Many of the things on this table came from over a decade’s worth of street cleaning and scavenging… After years of gathering things, I took a look at this strange collecting and saving of curiosities from streets and elsewhere–and realized it all looked very familiar. I went back to the plastic bag with the pack rat hoard. The two collections were laid out on tables, and the uncannily similar commonality was a sudden and delightful revelation. The pack rat and I had something in common—noticing things out of the ordinary, and setting them aside. Picking up something they come across in their travels was not unlike my seeing something on the ground and putting it in my pocket. Like souvenirs or mementos, they’re things saved on the way.”

Not unlike scribbling in notebooks.

***

There was also this: A conversation I overheard when a women sat down near me in a waiting room. She was on Facetime with a man. I couldn’t hear what the man was saying, just a mumble.

Woman: “I’m so over you. You’re such a liar.”

The man answers in a surprisingly upbeat voice, sounding jolly.

Woman: “You’re so full of shit. Just full of it. We’ll talk when I get home.”

Man: More upbeat mumble.

Woman: “I’ll see you later.”

Pause.

Woman: “Whose pink water bottle is that? You don’t own a pink water bottle.”

Man: Sounds even more jolly.

Woman: “You are so full of shit. You’re full of it. I love you. Bye.”

***

There’s also a long passage from Joan Didion’s essay, On Keeping a Notebook, published in her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

“The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best….

“I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’); careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether It was snowing outside.

“I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not… Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”

Didion’s point, anyway. Wouldn’t the world be boring if we all approached things the same way?

***

One final quote, this time from an article in the New York Times magazine by singer Dessa, who writes about losing her voice:

“The first show in Portland, Ore., sold out in advance. My younger brother, Max, and my dad flew in to catch the concert. I was touched when I learned they would be coming, but now worried about performing poorly in front of them. Max had even agreed to sing backup on a song. Related vocalists sometimes have what’s called ‘blood harmony,’ a special vocal blend that emerges from similar timbres.”

“Blood harmony,” I wrote. “Who knew? Probably everyone but me.”

And promptly used it in my novel.