When I first met my friend and CITYVIEW columnist Joe Weeg, I walked into our conference room at Big Green Umbrella Media headquarters with a pen and a yellow legal pad. He immediately started laughing at me. “I remember when I used to carry those things around,” the now-retired Polk County prosecutor told me. “These days, I carry a cup of coffee,” he said with that famous sparkle in his eye.
And there you have it. The legal pad. The go-to note-taker for many of us. It is my lifeblood. Three ruler-drawn columns with six spaces for my tasks of each weekday and a catch-all for everything else. As each task is completed, it is crossed off. It’s a simple process in today’s overly complicated digital world, but it works for me — and it has for years.
In going through boxes of old stuff in the basement of our home, I found many of my college textbooks and a stack of spiral notebooks. They were full of my tasks of the day, written out in the same way I do now. One of the notebooks was unused and inserted in a green plastic cover. Perfect! I took it to work and used it instead of the standard yellow legal pad that Joe mocked me about. Being packed away tightly for 31 years kept the pages of this notebook crisp and white.
While using it, I ripped out some pages and couldn't help but think of my seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Manske. She was a wonderful instructor and a pleasant woman, but we students knew her point of irritation. She would become deeply annoyed by the ragged edges of a piece of paper torn from a spiral notebook. As such, she required loose leaf sheets from her students for all assignments. If a student only had a spiral notebook, then she would demand that the frayed edges be cut off evenly with scissors before being handed in. I think it all had to do with her ability — or inability — to jog the papers into neat stacks. I couldn’t appreciate her obsessive-compulsive behavior as a 13-year-old, but now I can truly relate.
With textbooks becoming obsolete and iPads filling up bookbags for many of today’s students, the spiral notebook may have gone the way of the dinosaur. With that in mind, I will hang on to this one, carefully drawing my ruler lines on each page until I am down to the last sheet. Then it’s back to the yellow legal pad, regardless of what Joe Weeg has to say.
Have a fantastic Friday, and thanks for reading.
Shane Goodman
President and Publisher
Big Green Umbrella Media
shane@dmcityview.com
515-953-4822, ext. 305 | 
