Appropriated Book

A few years ago I got a new watch.  It came with a  palm-sized
instruction manual written in eight languages.  The cover was plain black with the Italian words for clocks and instructions:  orologi instruzioni.  I would have bought the watch just to get that manual.  The tissue-thin pages were printed in 6 point type, and it was mysteriously illustrated with fine pen lines with charts, graphs, clock faces and diagrams.  I could never make sense of any of the instruzioni, even the ones translated into English.  But I quickly appropriated the book itself to be my new journal. 

I yearned to write in it with my fine black pen.  I began carrying it everywhere with me and using the marks on the pages as well as the text blocks as prompts for tiny quick sketches.  I wrote very little in this book-- it really is more of a sketchbook, but the drawings take me right back to the days they were done.

We were in New York on a freezing cold rainy day waiting for a bus that didn't seem to be running that day to take us uptown.  My hands were numb, but the little book needed a drawing of the funny tour bus with its load of blue-plastic-swathed riders.  I had slipped the book into my jacket pocket, of course, so I was able to sketch while huddled under the bus shelter as we waited and waited for a bus. 

A few weeks later I was sitting in bright sunlight at  graduation at the college where I taught.   I had slipped the little book into the sleeve of my robe, so I could amuse myself during endless speeches and exhortations.

The page on the right above is a sketch I made as the moon was setting.  There was a perfectly placed clock face on the page, so I began with that and drew in the rest of the drawing around it.  I had carried the book in my pocket when I went out for a walk in fields near my house.

These two pages were done a few weeks apart.  On the left, my grandson Jacob drew the archway at a wedding we were attending together.  He was getting a little bored, so he amused himself by drawing in my book, which I, of course, had in my pocket.  On the right is a drawing of some water buffalo at a farm in New Hampshire.  We were visiting our son and his family a few weeks later, and we visited the buffalo farm.  I loved the shapes of the water buffalo in their mud wallow.  Looking at the sketch I remember the conversations we had as well as the excellent mozzarella we bought there!