I have volumes of them on my office shelf: some are spiral bound, heavy-papered sketch books meant for the drawing that I always wanted to be able to do (I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler). A few are green-covered accountancy record-keeping books that I bought from an old, long-closed stationary store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when I was right out of college. The oldest are laboratory notebooks from middle school, covered with those plasticized textbook covers that you could buy, ten for a dollar at a five and dime, emblazoned with the names and Latin mottos of universities that you might attend, although my grandmother assured me that I would never attend Holy Cross no matter what. Wherever I’ve moved over the years, I’ve dragged my notebooks along with me; every once in a while, when the ground beneath my feet seems to be too porous, I read them to see where and who I was, and how I became who I am.

There are huge time gaps in many of them, sometimes days, sometimes weeks and months. In one instance, a year. (Adolescents are like that when it comes to focus and dedication; you can’t expect too much.)