The handwritten dedication at the start of the journal elicits hope, love, and tenderness. Who is this “fearless and awesome” Alexandra daughter? Did she share her dad’s vision of what’s to come in her life?
Dad’s vision is clear: she’ll embark on writing adventures with her trusty lime-green notebook at her side. Is the prodigal daughter a child just beginning to show a love for words? She’ll take the journal to the garden and spend hours dreaming up her own adventures.
Or perhaps she’s an older teenager planning to flee the safety of her parents’ nest. She’ll take the notebook around the world to document and then later share her experiences with her dad, her children, and her children’s children.
In either case, Dad sees the glorious Alexandra living a life of freedom through writing. She’ll find herself in the blank pages and return to him a changed person. The journal promises to serve her well.
Feel the anticipation and hope of an entirely blank journal awaiting its future, made even giddier by the promised writing adventures. She’s numbering the pages. She stops at forty. Not a bad start. There will be more. Much more. Its pages will fill. It’ll find purpose.
And then she writes. Glorious thoughts-turned-words, observations, experiences. The journal becomes daily habit.
Alas, the hope and dream of our fearless Alexandra quickly and easily filling page after page with the barreling scrawl of a pen that can’t move fast enough dies by the fifteenth page. At first, she writes two pages each day. And then, a week later, she skips a day. One day becomes two, three. Fourteen pages she fills, and then she simply stops. She’s lost interest. Hopes and dreams die as she sets the journal aside.
Did our Alexandra ever feel fearless and awesome, or was that something other people saw in her that she never did? Dad’s obviously not a writer; he misspelled “writing” in the dedication. Did Alexandra bristle at that? Perhaps she doesn’t love him. “He tries too hard,” she thinks. “He pretends to know me, but he doesn’t know me at all. He wanted to be a writer, not me. I want nothing to do with wordplay.”
Eventually, she tears out the first fourteen pages, leaving ragged edges in the spine and numbers fifteen through forty lost without their starting anchor. She leaves the first page, the one with the words from her dad so thoughtfully inscribed, in the journal.
The lime-green notebook ends up in a thrift store bin, tossed aside with other journals started and never finished. One, two, maybe three pages of the best intentions, and then their writers turned away from the page, unable to bear the tugging “I should write” thoughts that plagued them every time they saw the pristine bound books on their shelves. The journals became dusty. Instead of choosing one, opening it ever so lovingly, and giving in to the pull of writing magic, these lost writers tossed the journals into “Donate” piles and delivered them to drab second-hand stores to live under sickly green fluorescent lights, calling to shoppers to adopt them.
Alexandra’s lime-green notebook sits closed tight with an elastic band next to a royal blue “Keep Calm and Write On” journal. With only two pages filled, the Keep Calm journal has fared worse than Alexandra’s notebook.
The dust gathers, disturbed every couple of days by a mildly interested customer rummaging for a greater treasure. The lime-green notebook would sigh if it could. It’s waiting for exactly the right person to pick it up. To see the note from loving father to potential writer daughter. To feel the possibilities.
When that person comes, she will notice the careful numbering of pages fifteen through forty. She’ll know that she must take this notebook home to begin a new life as writer and companion.