The 52 Lists Project #8

List Your Favorite Quotes:

I love quotes, and am always writing them on scraps of paper, in book margins, in my journal or on my calendar. Today, these are my favorite. If asked another day, the response might be completely different.

Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.

~Richard Bach

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

~Robert Louis Stevenson

Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability.

~Gretchen Rubin

You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

~A.A.Milne

Live and create. Live to the point of tears.

~Albert Camus

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

~Mark Twain

Everyone needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

~Saul Bellow

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

~Annie Dillard

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

~Mary Oliver

We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

~Jack Gilbert

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

~Erma Bombeck

Lost

I have a couple ideas for what to write about.

I have gathered photos to accompany these posts.

I have notes to remind me of what I want to say.

It’s all in my red notebook.

And I’ve misplaced my red notebook.

My daughter, Kate, gave the book to me a couple years ago, for Christmas. It’s a blank book, with lined pages in the eight and a half by eleven inch size. It has a red, corrugated vinyl cover that is easy to spot, and easy to keep clean. Red is my favorite color. It has a black elastic band attached, to hold it closed when not in use. That keeps the pages neat.

Very special.

I’d been thinking, around the time I received it, about how many magazines I kept around, simply because there was one recipe I wanted to try, one web-site to explore, one special bit of inspiration I wanted to remember or information I wanted to have at hand.

Perfect!

My habit became this: when sitting down to page through a magazine, I’d keep my red book and a nice pen beside me. When I came across a tidbit I wanted to remember, I’d jot it down in the book. In addition, I kept it close when surfing the internet, to take down inspirational sayings or snippets of information. Quotations from books, references, sequels or authors to remember were added to the pages. When putting in a DVD to watch a movie, I’d grab the book in case, in the previews, I saw another that I wanted to remember. When blog ideas came to me, I’d put them in the book, to refer to later.

Now, the book has gone missing.

It’s all I can think about.

I have searched the house and the car.

I have retraced my steps, in my mind, a hundred times.

I don’t know exactly how long it’s been gone.

I wake in the night with the puzzle still on my mind. “Oh!”, I’ll think to myself, “It must be in the old satchel that I took with me the last time I went to the mainland…” or “in the big bag that I switched off for the smaller purse last week…” or “under that box in the back seat of the car…”, and, sure that in the morning I will now be able to put my hands on it, I go peacefully back to sleep.

But, in the morning my nighttime ideas do not pan out. Then I think, “Okay, not the satchel, but what about the little overnight bag…” and one idea will lead to another search and another, until I once again feel like I’ve exhausted all possibilities.

But things do not just disappear.

It has to be here somewhere.

Sometimes I think I saw it recently, and I only need to remember where.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote in it, but I know it was not that long ago.

One week…maybe two I have been without it.

Every bit of information it holds has taken on added value simply from being inaccessible. I can’t fathom retrieving all of that absolutely vital knowledge. It is gone.

Until I find my red notebook.

Do things become more important, or just more appreciated, when they are gone?