Left: Pages torn from my Moleskine date book. Sketches I made of residents in a nursing home at a concert. Staedtler Pigment Liner and gouache. Click on the image to view an enlargement.
I haven't ever been happy with the new generation of Moleskines. (I used old Moleskines for writing notebooks longer ago than I care to remember.) I'm somewhat happy with their large 8 1/2 x 11 inch or so watercolor sketchbook. I used one for my 2011 Fake Journal. The paper is OK. I don't like the landscape format, and I haven't used one since (for a real or fake journal).
The sketchbooks Moleskine makes all have a smell coming off the paper that even after airing out bothers me—so they aren't an option for me either. Sometimes I carry their soft-covered small notebooks with gridded and perforated pages for the odd note.
But to make a really, really long story short, because of printer problems I haven't been printing my calendar but instead have been relying on a Moleskine date book. (This has been a disaster because they start their week with MONDAY in the first column of the full month calendar and so I look down and think that Monday is really Sunday and so on. I usually catch myself before I miss an appointment or meeting, but you get the idea. It's hard to retrain a brain that is used to calendars starting on Sunday!)
Because of my frustration with this date book I only use the full month pages in the front of the book and the rest of the book I simply use for note paper, ripping out pages as needed.
The other day when I visited Phyllis in the nursing home there was a guitar concert her roommate wanted to attend. Since it wasn't time for physical therapy yet, off we went. I listened to the guitarist (he never did get the promised mandolin out) and looked around the room. I didn't have my journal, but I had this date book, so I took it out and started sketching, and painting, while I listened. Phyllis is accustomed to me doing this. She just kept tapping her fingers and listening to the music. Nina was just amused, and keep singing along with the performer. No one else noticed.
I tore the pages out when I got home and stuck them in my regular journal.
If you read the text on the page you'll see that the whole experience made me thing about my own aging process. I'm not a huge music fan. I like a lot of music that most people I grew up with think of as retro (like songs by Jimmy McHugh; but they were fun to play on the piano). But what's going to happen when all the baby boomers are in nursing homes? What music will the travelling musician play? What will people sing along to? I think there will be a lot of Elton John, candle in the wind stuff. Maybe some Billy Joel, though we all will have to watch our hips and not jump around much. I've always been partial to Paul Simon and you can actually sing his songs. I just hope I can still see well enough to sit there and sketch.
