Comments on: Harvard Square Notebook, late 1960s-early 1970s

By: Christine

Christine — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:27:09 +0000

How sweet and funny your post is! I laughed all the way through. How neat to be peeking into someone else’s notebook, never mind a 30-year-old one! I LOVE your dad’s recordings of your verbal childhood inventions. Such things are really best written down! My brother is 4 years older than me, and my mom has told me about the many funny things he said about me being inside my mom, as well as right after birth. (The first thing he said when seeing me was “When’s the baby going to die?” – But he said it in German and made a grammatical mistake, which I can’t translate, making it even funnier.)
Without notebooks, we tend to forget most of these memories.
Thank you for sharing this precious piece of personal history.

By: Jessica Peppel

Jessica Peppel — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:16:50 +0000

That was really sweet! I am glad that you were able to find it, read it, and now cherish it!

By: carol

carol — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:30:32 +0000

Lovely post, Nifty. What a treasure for you to find and share with us, an unexpectedly poignant entry that brought back memories of my own. I would probably trace my notebook obsession back to my not-very-emotionally-expressive-but-I-always-did-know-that-he-loved-me dad too. He kept track of the weather and his bowling league scores among other things, and often gave me notebooks as gifts when I was little. Here’s to the ’60′s notebook dads!

By: Missy

Missy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:39:02 +0000

Wow, that is so neat. I love stuff like that. I don’t have any old notebooks, but do have a cookbook from my grandmother that had lots of little recipes and notes stuck in it. I treasure it!

By: betsy cañas garmon

betsy cañas garmon — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:53:12 +0000

What a great post! I love the insight into the life of a “record keeper”. In a few weeks I’m going to be teaching a short workshop on journaling to group of mostly non-journalers. One of the questions that I will be posing to them is:

Where is your record/history? & Does our history even matter? {I think that your post shows that yes, our bits of recorded life, however small, have much value.}

I expect that some of them will be surprised to find that with lists, numbers & notes they engage in “journal keeping” already.