The Mystery of the Jacques Cousteau Notebook

 

I’d like talk about “The Mystery of the Jacques Cousteau Notebook”.  It remains to this day one of the most inexplicable enigmas and most regrettable actions of my life, and it shall probably never be resolved this side of Heaven.

The Jacques Cousteau Notebook dated back to my middle school years, from about the same time as the Old Green Mill “Earth Tones” notebook mentioned yesterday. It too was a spiral notebook, but a full 8x10 one. It was originally bought for schoolwork, but I eventually ended up using it for some of my earliest drawing, creative writing, and copying poetry.

What I remember most are a few of the pictures. I know there was at least one Loch Ness Monster (like the one shown yesterday), a dragon, a Bigfoot and an Abominable Snowman that John drew for me, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it had one or two of my early maps in it and some pictures of Dwarves. It also had a drawing of “The Three Loonies”.

The Three Loonies were three characters from a ‘Shakesperean-type’ play I was working on. One was fat, one was skinny, and one was old and bearded. If I let my mind go unfocussed for a moment, I can almost see the picture, with them dressed in that type of fairy-tale Medieval clothing I used to draw. Anyway, the ‘plot’ (such as it was) centered around a mysterious letter as the McGuffin that got passed around, stolen, and restored. Imagine a Laurel-and-Hardy film, if they were joined by a wise if absent-minded elderly gent. Anyway, the play never got any farther than the picture and, perhaps, a few notes.

I have no firm memory of this, but the poetry probably included some copied verses from The Dark is Rising books and may even have included one or two of my own prototypical efforts at rhyming. There might have been a guide to the Futhark runes, as well. As I say, it’s something of a blur at this distance, as even is the exact timing of when the tragedy happened.

It was of my own devising; that alone is devastatingly clear. The time had come for our annual summer camping trip. Somehow, I had conceived the idea that something might happen to my precious Notebook while I was away (What was I thinking? Stolen? Maliciously destroyed?) Anyway, I was overcome with some sort of Tom Fool romantic notion that my efforts must be hidden for safekeeping, so I went about searching for the best hiding place imaginable.

I clearly recall at least four places I considered for the stashing. The simplest was behind the towels in the bathroom closet. Rejected as too easy, and in danger of damp. Then was slipping it into the access passage to the roof or possibly down the access passage under the house, both available in the boys’ room. The last place I remember considering was between the piles of blankets in the closet of Mom and Pop’s room.

All I know now is that I hid the Notebook. And then … I did all I could do to put out of my mind where I hid it.

Why? Why? Why did I do it? The closest answer I can come up with now is that it was a kind of game, a real-life playing at a sort of adventure, a hide-and-seek, treasure-mappy thing that appealed to my youthful fancy and self-importance. Only I seemed to have played it all too well.

When we returned from out two or three days of camping, I went to retrieve the Notebook from where I seemed to remember having put it … in the blankets in Mom and Pop’s closet. It was not there, scramble through the folds how I might. I would have taken the pile apart in desperation if I could, but the closet was pretty much off limits to us kids (which I had thought in my sneaky way added to its safety) and I could not just go digging around. But it was pretty plainly not there, anyway.

I checked the other hidey places as best as I could (they were all predicated on how hard they were to reach) but came up with nothing, and Mike (the biggest kid ahead of me) wasn’t sticking his head up or down any holes for me. I was left with the wretched recognition that something bad had happened to the Notebook after all, and that it was me.

The enigma only deepened over the years as with time all the possible recesses of the house were explored. Finally, after Pop passed away, the time came to sell the house, and it was thoroughly emptied from stem to stern. Some surprising relics turned up, from ancient clippings of newspaper comics to old tracings of mine from Cinders, but nary a scrap of the vanished Notebook.  Had it been inadvertently thrown out? Eaten by mice? Disintegrated by time? I wonder still, mourning my foolish loss, and pondering, every now and then, The Mystery of the Jacques Cousteau Notebook.