It's National Notebook Day (Little Green Notebook)

What's in your notebook?

From 2021, during the COVID days

Move over black bears, magnolia trees, and microchimerism, topics I’d bandied about for this week’s column, for today, May 15, 2025, is National Notebook Day.

Oh, how I love notebooks. I currently have eleven active notebooks; we won’t count the ones I’ve paused or abandoned. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt a compulsion to write stuff down. The idea of talking on the phone or sitting in a presentation without a notebook sends cold shivers to the backs of my knees.

I am not alone. There are articles galore on the notebooks of famous folk, where you can read glimpses into the daily life of Marilyn Monroe (“Never miss an actor’s guild meeting!”), Jack Kerouac’s thoughts on Allen Ginsberg (“He is a mental screwball”), and ponder the drawings of Leonardo DaVinci.

All kinds of folks keep notebooks, for all kinds of reasons.

And then there’s Robert Shields (1918-2007). Shields, a former minister and high school English teacher, began fastidiously documenting the details of his life when he was in his mid-fifties and carried on this way for twenty-five years, when a stroke rendered him unable to continue.

During his twenty-five-year episode of hypergraphia, Shields spent at least four hours a day typing notes of his life told in five-minute increments, amassing a diary of roughly 37.5 million words contained in ninety-one boxes. It is the world’s largest diary and is housed in the Manuscript Archive of Washington State University.

Surely, Shields was out gallivanting and seeing the world to have so much to write about, right? Actually, he was so protective of his writing time that he rarely left home, and limited his sleep to two-hour stints so he could record his dreams and sleeping habits.

What the heck? What was he writing about? While the boxes are sealed and will remain so until 2057, we do have some tidbits and sneak peeks.

“I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.”

“I put in the oven two Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese at 350 degrees.”

“I ate the Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese and Cornelia ate the other one.”

Sheilds recorded the weather, the mail including junk mail, the weight of every newspaper, his bathroom habits, his own biometrics, and other details. He also chronicled what he read, quotes he found interesting, and musings on philosophy.

In a gracious act, he and his wife established a foundation that covers the cost of archiving and sorting his diary. One of his daughters hopes he’ll be remembered as an active member of the community, interesting and caring, full of energy and well loved. Quirky, yes, but a father, a husband, and friend to many.

While the quotidian nature of this writing may seem ridiculous now, I think of it as a time capsule. We’ve always turned to primary documents to glean the details of real life. In this week’s news, we learned that biologists turned to hundreds of ancient Chinese poems to piece together missing information about the endangered Yangtze finless porpoise. My own family is thrilled to have “The Diary of Nannie Haskins,” which my great-great-grandmother kept as a sixteen-year-old girl during the Civil War. I am touched beyond the realm to read what she ate and who she talked to, how she got around, and the details of her life. So was Ken Burns, who used parts of her diary in his Civil War documentary.

What seems like the drivel and grind of today is the marvel and fascination of tomorrow. In keeping our notebooks, we are talking to the future. When I return to the notebooks and diaries of my childhood, I am holding hands with a previous version of myself, peering into her life with a tenderness I never could have anticipated then.

Not only do I keep records and notes of my oftentimes boring daily life, I work for a family as their documentarian, keeping an ongoing chronicle of the goings-on at their horse and cattle ranch. I suspect both our grandchildren and theirs will appreciate these glimpses into our lives.

Morning Pages, I write in three different directions

So, you are probably asking now, what’s in your notebook, Mary? If you look at today’s entries, you’ll find copious notes on Robert Shields and a sketch of my own family tree tracing the generations between myself and Nannie Haskins. There are other tidbits such as, “A place for everything and everything in its place, damnit!” and “Ronin the rat sets the landmine sniffing record and I’m impressed.”

I also have this sentence. “Let it be said, here on May 10, 2025, that people are talking about the inevitability of artificial intelligence overtaking us.”

Like Robert Shields, I cannot tell you why I keep notebooks. I can tell you that I enjoy going back and saying hello to all those selves I have been and wishing well to all my future selves as I write every day.

Happy National Notebook Day! What’s in your notebook? Share if inclined!

Notes on a day

THE PLUG

My book, Box Turtles, Hooligans, and Love, Sweet Love, a collection of columns from my weekly column I call Little Green Notebook, is available on Amazon, or see marydansak.com for instructions on ordering directly. It’s a great little homage to critters large and small, and an antidote to gloom and doom. Rave on, biodiversity!

Reading with a baby donkey is nice.