HLRGazette Archives

Relive some of our best stories.

  • Increase font size
  • Default font size
  • Decrease font size

Holly Lake Effect

E-mail Print PDF
When a note can be beautiful....
You can't remember and you say it worries you? You cite the classic dilemma of having been invited to a rather wonderful sounding party at someone's house on such and such a date and you can't remember whose house or whether it was for Friday or a week from Monday. You're invited to a covered dish event and you accept, only two days later you can't remember the name of the dish you were supposed to bring. So you bring beans. Upgraded of course with dollops of brown sugar and ketchup. You're shocked when somebody reminds you that you had promised to bring your famous chocolate cream puffs. You suddenly decide-as you do when something hurts you so much you finally have to admit going to a doctor is a good idea-that you have to start writing notes. It might please you to know that writing notes has a long history. The practice probably dates back to the time of Shakespeare who was afraid he'd forget what came after "To Be or Not to Be". Or the first note-taker could have been Cro Magnon man who chiseled "a dozen eggs and a quart of milk" on a piece of granite, light enough to carry.

Even in this day and age, the age of kindles and I-pods and texting and other human brain activities taken over by "e-stuff", there is no substitute for the good old fashioned note. That means a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil or even a crayon if that's all you have. Now you need to select the paper carefully. If you write your note on the back of a Wal-Mart receipt the whole thing will likely land up in your wastebasket. If you write on some of the alarmingly dwindling white space on an inside page of The Dallas Morning News or the Tyler Telegraph, it is likely to wind up wrapped around the bones and peelings from your most recent meal.

Or face the danger of thoughtlessly wadding it up and throwing it away or shredding it when you get trapped in one of those paper shredding frenzies when you can't tell the difference between a cancelled check and your list of what you're supposed to buy at SAM's. Having written a note, a very carefully worded list of items and their various sources, expect to become dangerously angry when you can't find it. You can solace yourself by saying -"oh yeah-I can remember three items... who can't remember three items?"-and then when you get back find it wasn't peanut butter after all and it wasn't creamy jalapeno dip. You then try to calm yourself by saying you certainly needed those things. That's a lost-cause strategy, something like curling up with a rolled up bath towel when you can't find your favorite pillow. It also takes on an extra dimension of nastiness when you open the cupboard and find you already have three jars of peanut butter and you remember that you had to throw the last jalapeno dip away because it gave you heart burn. Notes, my friends, will eliminate all this distress.

To get professionally into the note writing business consider first the color of the note paper and the size. Select a bright color such as cardinal red or high noon yellow. That way you'll have an easier time trying to find it in a whole heap of fresh mail and piled-up receipts from Wal-Mart or the local drive-in. Select a piece that's big but not too big. You want something you can slip into your pocket or your wallet or your handbag without making a bulge. You want something you don't have to unroll or unfold since unless you have excellent penmanship, those distortions will make most writing look like wet-weather deer tracks..

I knew someone who solved the problem by giving numerical values to all the ordinary items usually purchased. She had a poster tacked on her kitchen wall which listed all the usual things one has to buy from week to week. Each item had a number and she carried a copy of the list in her pocket at all times. So if her list had 1,3,7,and 8 on it all she had to do was pull out the master copy and she was up and away. Only problem was that the list of items kept getting longer and longer and when she was up to 110, she knew there had to be a better way.

Yes list making can become an obsession. Approach the subject with care, therefore. Once you start there is no going back.