School notebook doodling back in the day

No artist, but the scribblings were at least somewhat cryptic. Maybe?

The art of student doodling in notebooks is a creative, often subconscious, act born from boredom or stress, transforming plain margins into imaginative worlds with simple shapes, patterns, characters (like anime, fantasy creatures), or detailed scenes, acting as a mental release and sometimes even a focus aid, showcasing everything from intricate mandala-like designs to hidden worlds peeking through “torn” paper, all made with everyday pens and pencils.

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I feel sure that anyone who has sat for long, stultifying hours in grade school classrooms when growing up, will remember, or not, their doodling on paper or on the inside pages of notebooks.

I am one of those people who save everything I think has some reason, however tenuous, for being preserved until I am no longer around to go back and retrieve those various bits and pieces of memorabilia.

Now that I am approaching 75, there is, understandably, a lot of stuff, or artifacts as I now like to refer to these objects, documents, photos, papers, writing, old postcards, and keepsakes from as long as 60 years ago.

For some astonishing reason, I have, over the course of many years and many moves, managed to save countless things or “stuff” that I always imagine has some intrinsic value, some link to my past that can only be recovered by means of these keepsakes. They have been preserved in attics, storage units, plastic file folder containers, closets, and nooks and cubbyholes all over my various apartments, and in several rooms at my mother’s large house downtown when I lived with her as her caregiver for ten years.

It astounds me how most of this hasn’t been lost or thrown away.

Not long ago, I came across some worn out file folders and notebooks from high school during the late 1960s, containing English research papers, graded tests and quizzes, and even some algebra and geometry tests which look Ike hieroglyphics to me today. How on earth did I successfully solve those equations?

A couple of the notebooks are literally covered with idle, monotonous at times, doodles. I am obviously no artist by the looks of this scribbling. Since I could not draw, I would endlessly create triangles, boxes, lines connecting geometric shapes, and certain words that had treasured associations, especially just after a new school year had started and I was grieving the end of a carefree summer far away from the junior and senior high schools I attended.

It was still quite hot in New Orleans in summer, and our schools were not air conditioned to combat the September heat. The old high school I attended, built in 1929, didn’t even have window AC units, and huge windows were kept open all the time for at least some cooling ventilation. It was a large three-story Spanish mission style building with a bell tower and red tile roof.

I was a good student, but I was often bored in school, and this was long before cell phones arrived for surreptitious use in classrooms. As the year wore on, the notebooks became more covered in weird and even cryptic, lines, words, phrases and depictions of certain words and phrases, as if this mass of seemingly mindless doodles had some power to makes the day seem less torturously long. I had a history teacher who would leaves us alone in class after writing notes on the board for us to copy.

I naturally don’t remember most of the details of my day-to-day classroom rituals and lessons. But on some days school really felt like a prison until the 3:15 bell sounded.

I spent long, wistful moments staring out the windows in various classes, looking at the residents of nearby houses sitting on their porches. Blissful freedom. How I wanted to be anywhere but school.

My doodling on notebooks were a release valve for doing anything but school work or listening to the teacher drone on. And there were the constant, intrusively now-distant memories of the previous summer break while the next one seemed an eternity away.