Take Note By Laura J. Oliver

I got caught while on a secret mission the other day. I was rushing to make my flight at Heathrow after a week of visiting my daughter in England, when I decided to hide a note for my British grandsons to find after I was back in America—maybe a riddle to figure out, or perhaps a clue to a present I could quickly tuck under a sofa cushion in the playroom.

The hope was to extend my presence, to keep my identity and love for them in mind for just a few more days. That’s what we all want, right? To extend love’s memory? When your family lives an ocean away, and school and athletic activities consume every minute of a time zone five hours ahead of your own, it’s hard to teach a 6 and 7-year-old who you are to them in any meaningful way.

I’m Mummy’s mommy.

Incredulity and disbelief. (Okay, mine, but theirs as well.)

So, I got busted. Those astute rascals slipped up behind me where I was madly scribbling with their colored markers, and said, “What are you doing? Are you writing us a note?”

Hunching over it, I said, “Of course not. Go away.”

I used to tuck notes in sports jacket pockets and under bedsheets when I was the one leaving. I’d hide messages in weird places like the microwave, the medicine cabinet, among the coffee filters, or taped to the bathroom mirror. It could take the whole time I was gone to find them all.

When we were kids, my older sister used to lock her room and leave me notes with dire warnings to stay out (or else!) while she was babysitting or on a date. To make it
anonymously threatening she would sign her notes, “The Black Hand,” and draw one on as the signature.

I knew it was her.

And those threats inspired great creativity. I once crawled out my bedroom window, edged along the garage roof between our rooms, and let myself into her bedroom window to purloin an orange hip-hugger swimsuit which I wore swimming all afternoon at the community beach and sneaked back into her drawer before she got home. Damp.

I am a terrible criminal.

I left myself notes as well. When I was feeling super victimized by virtue of being the powerless youngest, I’d write down all the reasons I wasn’t speaking to my sister, and a list of her crimes, because without the list to consult, I’d forget in about an hour.

This same sister was fastidious; her room was perennially perfect, so for some reason, when she left for Girl Scout Camp, my parents wrote her letters informing her that they had rented her bedroom out to a tribe of Woodland Indians who had built a small cookfire on her rug and were dancing around it in there. Every day, there was another update mailed to camp as to what the tribe was up to. This was probably my father’s idea. Creative but not terribly empathetic.

My mother left me a note in my suitcase when I went away to college. As a single parent who worked, she had to drop me off a day before the move-in day for all the other students. It was weird to arrive at my future alone. I opened her note by the ancient elm in the center of campus after she’d headed home. Life is full of leaving, I read, and there would only be more from that moment on. Then she reminded me of the things that are eternal, like telephones, letters from home, and mother love.

My teachers sent my parents notes, and they all said pretty much the same thing: “Laura is not working up to her potential.” I didn’t see the point. Half potential was working well enough.

Now this is my number one fear.
Not kidding. My number one fear.

I’ve been finding a lot of notes on my front door lately. It is election season here in town— mayor and alderman are up for grabs, and there is an extensive field of candidates. The notes all say they are sorry they missed me.

They didn’t miss me. I was home and holding very still.

Notes can end up in the wrong hands. Mr. Oliver wrote a note to Linda Hale in second grade. He was six. She was seven. But Mrs. Durbeck, peering inside her students’ desks, found Mr. Oliver’s to be an appalling mess (so young and so already himself), so she dumped the contents on the floor in a furious demonstration of what happens to untidy little boys, and the note spilled out on the floor.

It was addressed to the alluring Miss Hale, Mrs. Durbeck announced, triumphantly waving it around. She read it to herself, then aloud to the class as punishment.

“I like you. I will kiss you at recess.”

Really, Mrs. Durbeck?

Wow, I just got this. I’m leaving you notes every Sunday morning, but only you, because now I don’t so much leave notes as take notes—noticing is a devotional practice as is sharing the wonders we see and the mysteries we can’t solve. Like how to hang on to each other.

Memory is malleable, and time an eraser. But at some point in the past, we learned to name things, and in that moment, when letters turned into words, and words into memory, we wrote them down, to extend our days, to buy ourselves a little more time.

To say, remember who I was to you when I am gone.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.