What the Sketchbook Said Instead

November twenty-sixth. Thanksgiving morning. I opened the sketchbook with the specific intention of making the sixth drawing.

I don't know when I decided there would be a sixth drawing. The fifth one, Gerald's vine shadow on the kitchen shelf, was only published a couple of weeks ago, and I hadn't consciously planned a follow-up. But I sat down with coffee and the sketchbook and a pencil and I had the unmistakable feeling of someone arriving somewhere with a purpose. I was going to draw something. The something was unclear. That felt fine.

What happened instead is that I wrote three paragraphs. Not notes toward a drawing, not a caption draft, actual sentences, in the sketchbook, in the space where a drawing would have gone. I wrote about the first drawing, which was the collapsed bowl on Thanksgiving morning 2011, nine years ago today, which I realize only now is not a coincidence and maybe is exactly the kind of thing I should have expected from my own brain. I wrote about the gap between the first drawing and the second, which was almost a year. I wrote about the gap between the third and the fourth, which was over five years. And then I stopped, because I'd arrived somewhere I hadn't planned to go: the question of what the sketchbook actually is.

I've been calling it a record. The accidental apartment record, five entries spanning 2011 to 2020, domestic objects, the same rooms over a decade. That's how I've described it on the blog and that's what I've believed. But sitting here this morning with the page full of handwriting and no drawing in it, I think record might be the wrong word. A record implies you knew you were keeping one. What I actually did, all five times, was notice something I hadn't noticed before and reach for the sketchbook because reaching felt like the right response. That's not record-keeping. That might be attention. And attention and record-keeping are different things, even when they leave the same marks on a page.

the sketchbook. full of words. zero drawings. classic.

The sixth drawing didn't happen this morning. I'm not sure whether that's because I didn't find the right thing to notice yet, or because I found it and wrote about it instead of drawing it. Either way, the question is now sitting in the sketchbook in handwriting rather than graphite, which feels like an answer of some kind, even if I haven't figured out what it's answering yet. Gerald's vine is still doing whatever it wants on the shelf. The November light is still doing what November light does. The sketchbook is open on the table and I'm going to go make something for Thanksgiving that takes more patience than the morning should probably allow.

the mug. the sketchbook. the question.