Tools

Notebook and pen. Or pencil. Pen preferred. Two essential tools for marking down unexpected encounters. Mine I keep in a sling bag worn around one shoulder and across the chest. Best for having two hands free. The notebook is made in the tradition used by French schoolchildren. Also in the French tradition, this notebook, or jot pad as I call it, is a bit more expensive than its American counterparts. The paper is weighty and silky. It takes the ink with grace. It feels good to write in it. The ink does not show through so that both sides of the page are used. Perhaps this makes it a good value after all. Two shops in town carry this brand. The shops are small and locally owned. I buy from both so that they'll keep the product in stock. Inside I write many things...musings, happenings, book and movie titles, good meals, people met... Having the jot pad handy might be a holdover from fieldwork days among the Gypsies in Poland. Suspicious of anthropologist types, I stored their words in my head and then ran to places for private recording. Or maybe it comes from when I was a journalist and logged notes from taped interviews. Lately I ask friends to make their own notes so that they, too, can enjoy the feeling of this pen to paper as I do, but the look in their eyes says otherwise.