Box Score - Julie

About a year ago I bought a little green steno pad at the grocery store. See, my life felt like it was whizzing by at an alarming rate, days melting into weeks, weeks into months and what? My son is 8?! I needed a way to make time stand still for a bit, so I could see what it was all about, keep track of it, not lose it as quickly as I lived it. And since I am a lazy photographer…and since I fancy myself a writer…enter the steno pad.

I write two steno pages every Sunday, and have for ten months, without fail, feet tucked under me, coffee balanced on the arm of the chair. I start with the previous Monday, and sift through the days, see what my mind catches, remembers, what gave shape to that particular day. Not everything makes it. The steno is small.

These are words that my writing group will never see; nothing from these pages will make it into any work of fiction or otherwise that I write for public consumption; I’m sorry, Natalie Goldberg, I will never go back through and highlight passages that are good. There is nothing ‘good.’ It’s a record.

There’s an X-Files episode where Agent Mulder is trying to explain to Agent Scully why he’s obsessed with reading the baseball box scores in the paper.

You’d like it, Scully. It distills all the chaos and action of any game in the history of baseball into one tiny, perfect rectangular sequence of numbers. I can look at this box and I can recreate exactly what happened on some sunny summer day in 1947. It’s like the numbers talk to me, they comfort me.

A trip to the beach, a tense situation with a student, worries about Sam, trying to get three pages of something to take to writing group, Christmas present nightmares, contempt for yardwork, conversations with Miles, trying to eat better, in-law gatherings, drinks with friends, gum surgery...on Sunday, coffee balanced on the arm of the chair, it all gets sifted and acknowledged, and reflected upon, and distilled into one tiny perfect rectangular sequence of words.