One True Thing by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen [Quindlen, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

I still own that datebook. I use it every day now; I’d be lost without it, without all the phone numbers, the slips of paper with scribbled notes about times and consults and medication, the notes about where I have to be next Tuesday, next Friday, next month. Sometimes I feel if I lost it I would lose the linchpin of my life. But of course I remember that in one way I lost the linchpin years before, not long after I acquired the datebook. It was not an even swap.

When the year is done I take its pages, its scrawled and sloppy and often unintelligible record—what did “11—DMC” on May 12 mean, anyhow?—and put them in a small manila envelope, seal it, and put it in a shoe box. Jules, who has things thrown in boxes in every closet in her apartment, bank statements and telephone messages and old junk mail and family photographs, says I am anal and do this to bring surface order to a spiritually chaotic life. But by now, five years after the habit began, it has simply become one of those things you do, like the way you fold or ball your socks or whether you eat corn on the cob from left to right or right to left.

I never open the envelopes to look at those old pages. And no one, looking at them after I am gone, will know much more about me than they’ve known before, except perhaps, if it was not already manifest, that I am a very, very busy woman and that I like to use a fine-tip marker pen with black ink, not blue.

But what would surely perplex anyone who ripped open the yellow envelopes and looked inside are the first two months of the first year. I remember well that they are completely empty.

The datebook sat on my desk through January and February. I wrote Jules’s number in it, which was unnecessary, since I knew it by heart. I wrote in Jeff’s and Brian’s addresses at school. I did not write in Jonathan’s address; he had done it himself. In blue ballpoint. The only blue ballpoint entry in the book.

“Do you like it?” Jon asked. “I was going to get you the one with a week on a page but I figured it would never be enough, with all your running around. The day-on-a-page version makes it pretty fat, but I figured the trade-off would be worth it.”

“It’s great, Jon,” I said.

“It was calling your name,” he said.

And it was, it was calling the name of the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and

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