Mad Caterpillar

I was recently cleaning out my office and purging a rather large portion of a previous life. I came across an old sketchbook filled with doodles -- most of them were just scribbles but there were a few pages that I couldn't bring myself to throw out. So I cut them out and pasted them into my current ink-and-paper journal. The images in this entry are some of my favorite doodles from those pages. I had to laugh when I saw the first one posted above, the doodle of the rather vexed/concerned/frightened character. I'd forgotten about drawing her. I'm not a particularly good artist and cannot usually render such expression in faces. But this one exactly captured the feeling I was having at the time that I drew it.

These next doodles were ideas for a tattoo. (No, none of these ever ended up on my body.) I don't have any tattoos yet, and go back and forth thinking about whether or not I really want one. If I ever do get one, I want it to be original, something that I've designed (or something designed specifically for me), that has a lot of personal meaning.

I love it when I come across old bits of paper, notes, or doodles like these, done a long time ago and long forgotten. Ten years ago I had a purse stolen from my desk in a downtown Seattle office. I was very frustrated, needless to say -- replacing one's driver's license and credit cards is always a hassle, and my checkbook was in there so I had to cancel my bank account too. I didn't have a lot of cash in the purse so it wasn't a huge loss, except for two things. My special pen and my ever-present small notebook were in that purse. The pen was a lovely Mont Blanc LeGrand ballpoint pen, given to me as a gift and I absolutely loved it. (I have a thing for nice pens...) I was very sad thinking of that pen sitting in some dingy hock shop somewhere after whatever jerk stole my purse traded it in for a few bucks. And I was so upset about the notebook. I always keep a little pad of paper with me so that I can jot down names, numbers, notes, ideas, etc. Never a good thing to lose. I figured I'd never see either again.

A little over a year ago, I got a phone call out of the blue from a man I didn't know. He asked for me by name, so I assumed he was a telemarketer and I started to give one of my usual "sorry don't need that, gotta go" excuses when he asked me if my purse had been stolen. It turns out he was a maintenance engineer for an apartment complex downtown, and he'd found my old purse wedged behind a hot water tank there that he was working on.

He mailed it to me the next day. I sent him a small reward for the effort, although I didn't expect anything more than some dried out leather and cancelled credit cards. When I got it back, I was absolutely thrilled that not only was my notebook still intact, but my pen was there, too! I couldn't believe it!

It was so much fun to read through my little notebook from the past! I remembered long-forgotten names, found some song lyrics I'd written (crap, but still a hoot to read), and best of all, some notes I'd jotted down while on a business trip to Chicago! As I usually do with these things, I took the pages that I wanted to keep and pasted them in my journal...

"Houston's, 12:00am on Tuesday, July 28 [1997] (Weds. 7/29) in Chicago.

John Marowski* from Acme Industries* passed out at the dinner table.

Jane Develle* (company Freelancer-in-Training) sick in the bathroom.

Me at the table, alone, wishing I was anywhere but here. What a life."

* Names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent.

Reading these notes completely transported me back to the night in question. At the time I worked for a software company, and had taken a trip to Chicago to train a new customer. On one of the nights I was there, I went to dinner with a couple of the customer's employees and two of the salespeople that I worked with. At that dinner, I watched three people consume more alcohol than I would have thought possible. Shots of tequila accompanied every glass of beer, and there were many glasses of beer... One of the customers passed out at the table, and the other got very sick in the restaurant bathroom. One of the salespeople that I worked with got drunk enough that I had to confiscate his keys and call a cab to get him home. Fortunately, the other salesperson was as sober as I was that evening. She went to the hotel next door to see if they had a room where we could take the guy that had passed out. It was while she was doing this that I wrote the note above. When she returned, the two of us half-dragged half-carried the unconscious guy next door (fortunately the hotel had vacancies) and plunked him down in a room to sleep it off. (The girl that had gotten sick had a friend come to pick her up.)

I remember going to the customer's office the next morning and being amazed that neither of the folks from the night before appeared to be hung over.

I had completely forgotten about this incident, and it's amazing how these sketchy notes brought all the details from that evening back to me, ten years later. And while this event was not particularly noteworthy or important, the details were still there, in the back of my mind. All it took was a few scribbled words to retrieve a memory that might have been lost for good otherwise. It is a good reminder for me of why it's so important to keep a journal. Good or bad, mundane or profound, I don't want to forget all of the adventures (and misadventures) that pepper life here and there!