Paper: The Miracle Product

When I was a little kid, I got hold of some money once. I bought a yellow binder filled with lined paper, and in the back of my parents’ pickup truck, I wrote my first poem. It went something like this:

I wish
I had a fish
In a dish.

It’s part of my lifelong love affair with paper and pen. One of my earliest memories is of writing long scribbly lines on piece of paper, imitating my mother’s handwriting. I felt proud to have done what she did, and I was hurt when she said it wasn’t “real” writing.

Mom told me once that I habitually tore paper into bits, which I folded and tucked away in hiding places. That behavior concerned her so she took me to consult with someone. When she told me this, I was an adolescent and she was explaining that I’d rejected her all my young life. The paper-hiding thing was one of a long line of incidents stretching from my refusal to nurse as an infant to my current rebellious behavior. It all struck me as unfair. Later I understood that it was unfair, and I understood that all of us instinctively blame others for our feelings unless we learn to accept responsibility for them.

But I digress. Paper and I go back a long way. I remember once spending my meager childhood funds on a business receipt tablet, the kind with a sheet of treated blue paper that you inserted between the white receipt and the yellow one.

I’ve always liked blank paper booklets. I have lots of tablets tucked away in the house. I like blank journal books and composition books.

Now, on computers, an empty Word document is a virtual piece of paper. But so far, virtual paper hasn’t replaced real paper in my life. I still keep the tablets. In fact, two of them are in residence right next to the computer, along with pens. They’re handy for making notes, practicing the composition of a sentence, or composing a poem.

This is the miracle of paper: Blank paper invites you to say something. It invites you to use words to capture ideas, like you use bait to capture fish. Thank God we invented paper. Rocks just don’t have the same appeal.