Little Greenie, the Emergency Notebook

When you realize the notebook you didn't want is the notebook you need

Ted here…

As recently as early June, my active pocket notebook was a Field Notes “Birds and Trees of North America” edition. Handsome avians alighted on the beautifully textured cover. Every time I pulled it from my pocket, I could appreciate its fine quality, construction, and creative vision.

Then youth baseball happened.

This would be my notebook of record for my son’s 10u baseball tournament in suburban Atlanta. I scored games from the dugout, I jotted coaching notes, I crammed it into my pocket to rush off and warm up a pitcher in the bullpen. Field dirt stained its edges. Hard use curled its corners. Driving rain on day three finished the job that my sweat had already started. Ink smeared, pages curdled. By tournament’s end, my notebook looked as beaten down and wrung out as I felt. Like a relief pitcher with gray at his temples and nothing left in his once-mighty arm, I forced it into retirement.

But vacation wasn’t over. We had another week at the beach and a visit to Main Street Books in Davidson, NC, ahead of us.

I needed a replacement.

Anybody reading this newsletter would welcome the chance to notebook hunt with a purpose. But I was on the road with family, not an easy setting in which to slip away to the quality stationer and its stash of shrink-wrapped Field Notes of the latest vintage open from 11-6 an hour away one-way.

As the vacation progressed, I had no back-up plan, just the phantom-limb discomfort of the empty pocket. Each time I reached for my notebook to record a “one bumper sticker” and found nothing but fabric, the yearning grew. And each time it was denied, because, I don’t know, we were doing 80 down a highway between Braselton and Pendergrass or something. And I wasn’t about to get between the Chik-Fil-A lunch run tethering my crew to sanity with a feeble “but my pocket feels empty.”

A few days later, fully now in beach mode and decidedly notebook-less, the crew needed cheap sunglasses and Coke Zeros. I lit out on my own to the Walgreens up the road while they boogie-boarded. As needy as a I was for an emergency pocket notebook, it was entirely plausible that I would forget to look for one. Because I couldn’t write down the to-do in my notebook. Imagine my self-satisfaction when, as cool as a cucumber to any outside observer, I remembered. Happy as a clam with myself, I cruised to the office supplies section. Thar she blew, as handsome as you please, the solution: a mini composition notebook. Green speckled cover, perfect-bound, a touch smaller than a field notes, college ruled. Best of all: 99 cents. Mission accomplished. Little greenie was nestled comfortably in the back pocket of my swim trunks no sooner than the cashier finished her diatribe on orange cream Coke Zero and sent me back out into the North Carolina sunshine.

This is not a story about how Little Greenie is, in fact, a superior choice to a Field Notes and we have been fooling ourselves all along. No, Little Greenie sucked. The cover immediately disengaged from the paper. The paper quality was elementary school loose leaf. But above all else, Little Greenie was there. Showing up is half the battle, as they say. Little Greenie showed up. It lasted through vacation, serving valiantly.

Even on my return home, in defiance of cool logic, I kept using Little Greenie. I respected the little scrapper, fighting above its weight, spitting in the eye of its high-class cousins in my notebook drawer. It kept showing up. I owed it a little something.

Alas, the sparkle would fade. Just yesterday, I had to handle it with care in a hectic spot to make sure its leaves didn’t scatter in the wind. Little Greenie got the pink slip. A Midori Traveler’s notebook in a fancy leather cover has taken over, with custom stamps from Good Postage where the Midori Stamp Caravan had alighted for a time: the polar opposite of a dollar mini composition notebook from Walgreens. But the green machine served me well. There are baseball scores, notes from the SABR convention I traveled to with Paul Jackon of Project 3.18, wisdom from Rangers manager Bruce Bochy, Rangers GM Chris Young, Pudge Rodriguez, knuckleballer Charlie Hough. There are observations from the road, observations from home. A little beach sand, a hint of infield dirt, smeared ink, loose pages. The stuff of life.

Maybe the unheralded pinch hitter didn’t stay up in the big leagues for long, but he made the most of his at bats.

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