The Jot Book

My parents loved to travel and they took us on family vacations every year.  This was in the late 1950's and 1960's so these were road trips - people didn't fly around back then like we do now.  For each road trip my mom would produce a little notebook we called a Jot Book.  This was basically a trip journal and I'm sure my parents dreamed up the idea at least partly as something to keep my brother and me busy and observant on the trip.  We recorded mundane things like where we stayed, how many miles we covered each day, where we stopped for breaks, what places we visited. That was the official part.  The real meat of the jot book, however, was not these dry facts but the notes we recorded about unexpected things we saw, things that made us laugh, unusual sights or signs, memorable meals or picnics, people we met, funny quips someone made.  It became a family joke that whenever anyone considered something noteworthy or funny they would call out, "Jot that down!" and the current scribe would have to pull out the notebook and make a new entry.  The experience of a "group-journal" was a fun one and added to the sense of sharing the experiences with each other.

When my parents visited us in Europe and took trips with us my mother always had a little jot book with her.  Once again, we took up the cry of "jot that down!"

After both my parents died and we were cleaning out their house we ran across some of these little books. They transported us to a time long past and brought back smiles and memories of things we had long forgotten.   I have often tried to keep Jot Books when we took trips with our own kids but I was never very successful at the follow-through.  We'd get a few sporadic jottings and then the rest of the trip faded into oblivion - perhaps we now rely too much on the ease of photographs instead of the effort of words to record our experiences and observations.

I pulled out a journal to use on this trip from California to Illinois, thinking a major life transition like this deserves some recorded thoughts.  So far, no jottings.  Emotional exhaustion, bad road conditions and pushing hard to make the day's mileage have so far dampened my efforts.  Perhaps a car racing down the interstate at 80 mph is not the ideal setting for recording much of anything.  But I haven't given up hope entirely!  Maybe tomorrow we'll slow down a little and start jotting...