Like Doing Brain Surgery at Panera

I was sitting at Panera this morning, writing, as usual, in my journal. And, as usual, some stranger took the opportunity to sit down and chat. Now, you can do almost anything at Panera without attracting attention (knit, read a book, have an argument on your phone), but the minute you try writing something with a fountain pen, you attract attention. At least I do. It’s like someone is performing brain surgery with a butter knife. People are amazed that it is even possible. That’s fascinating because we are not that far removed from a time when absolutely every well-organized adult had a fountain pen. (Probably the 1950s.) My mother had a pen in her purse, filled with purple ink. My father had one for signing important documents, filled (of course) with blue-black. I got through high school with a series of cheap pens filled with cheap blue ink. Banks had fountain pens in holders for people to write checks. (Ballpoints were kind of unreliable.) Go back just a few years, and every military officer in WWII had a government-issue fountain pen (special design to work well with the uniform).

This morning’s fellow was curious what I was writing, so I told him. Today’s project was a rough draft of material that will show up in this blog plus my personal daily reflections on how life is going. Nothing too intense. If he had shown up yesterday, he would have seen me writing a letter to my sister and another to my daughter. Last night, in my little sitting room area, he would have seen me filling a page with notes on my response to a paper a colleague wrote.

I keep several running journals on several topics, though most of them do not get daily, or even weekly, entries: one journal with topics related to my church, one each for the courses I am likely to teach, and one that is my private mental health journal (I talk to it as if it were a counselor).

That sounds like a lot—at least six running journals—but I don’t write in any of them daily. Some of them are for brilliant thoughts that will probably get forgotten the second I need them, and many function the way Dumbledore’s Pensieve did in the Harry Potter movies. According to the Harry Potter Wiki, “Dumbledore uses [the Pensieve] to siphon excess thoughts from his mind, allowing him to objectively examine patterns, uncover clues, and plan.” My journals work pretty well for doing that too.