The Future of Music Policy Summit January 10 - 11, 2001 - Washington, DC

ALL I NEED IS MY LETTS OF LONDON DATEBOOK
By Charlie Clark

Several factors undergird my recent executive decision not to get trendy and purchase one of those palm-size digital personal organizers where you can read this column on AvantGo.

First, my longtime commitment to technophobia. (I still have a few years on my membership in United Luddites of America, which means I have ample supply of sand and monkey wrenches for throwing into 21st century machinery.)

Second, there is my middle-aged guy's fear of losing any valuable apparatus that is designed to be carried around.

But the most earth-shaking factor is the attachment I've built up over the years to my traditional, pocket-size, pages-that-actually-turn calendar/address book. Its superiority goes well beyond practical issues of format: This ever-present rectangular counselor disciplines me every New Year's to sift through the state of my friendships and separate the wheat from the chaff.

All those new electronic gizmos are wowsome to many folks because they are virtual mini-computers. You keyboard in your Rolodex of phone numbers, paste in your upcoming appointments and then link the contraption up for computer sex with your home PC or your spouse's personal organizer and instantly synchronize your data.

This labor-saving wonder also gives you near-unlimited storage space.

Ah, but therein lies my objection.

Indulging in limitless space in an address book is like serving a tennis ball without having to keep it in bounds. I am actually glad that my no-moveable-parts, replaceable-annually pocket organizer contains just three blank pages for friends' names and phone numbers - a mere 19 slots per page. It's what presents me with my start-the-year-off-right challenge of reviewing my friends and acquaintances and ranking them on the cosmic, soul-searching basis of whether I'm likely to need their phone number within easy reach sometime in the next 12 months.

My datebook ritual actually starts in August. That's when stationery stores receive shipment of the coming year's editions, which by autumn are often sold out.

For a decade, I've been loyal to the 200-year-old brand known as Letts of London. It offers 2-by-3-inch address books bound in handsome black or cordovan, with gilt-edged paper and corners reinforced with classy brass. Though it gives you neither Internet access nor instant stock market quotes, my Letts organizer's back-matter is packed with nifty nationwide area codes, international dialing codes, useful toll-free numbers, a map of time zones, a wine vintage chart, metric equivalents, caloric values, clothing size equivalents, a table for calculating tips, notable dates and holidays and festivals in multiple countries. (Occasionally, I actually consult some of this information, usually to settle a bet.)

A poke through my home desk drawer reveals my stash of past editions of the datebook, a fairly complete set going back to the early 1980s. (Some years, you can tell that I lost the original Letts and at mid-year had to buy a cheap drugstore brand and staple in a photocopied list of the previous year's phone numbers.) Taken together, the collection forms a sentimental record of my life's ephemera - dental appointments, job interviews, vacation dates and dinner engagements - which will prove useful when and if there emerges an outpouring of public demand that I write my memoirs.

So the main value of this gold mine of out-of-date numbers is the evolving record it documents of my friends - and service providers such as doctors, bankers and my daughters' school switchboards. Each entry in this select elite has to earn its way past a threshold of relevancy, which, during my moods of confidence in my self-worth, seems a prize worth fighting for.

Yes, there are flaws in my system. Some people I know very well (my wife, my mother, the woman who cuts my hair) have numbers I long ago memorized and hence can omit. And every New Year's Day I have to summon the energy to sit down and recopy the 57 numbers of the chosen few. That puts me through the same agonizing process experienced by a stage director or an athletic coach in the task of eliminating some very qualified competitors.

But at the end of the day, I get to admire the judicious results.

The status my friends would enjoy if they knew they made the cut, I'd say, is easily higher than they'd get if they appeared on, say, a leaked list of clients of a Hollywood madam. But I wouldn't claim it's an honor up there with being inscribed in the scriptural Book of Life.

Realistically, I'd say the validity of my datebook entry process roughly equals that of People Magazine's annual list of the ``Most Intriguing People."

Charlie Clark lives is the author of Finish High School At Home and a frequent contributor to The Idler.