Another blog?

Just what we need, right? And what's this one going on about? Little blue squares? I originally thought I would concentrate on things like paper and pens but I have decided to branch out and include other items of (my) interest and hope that someone thinks it's interesting too.

So why "Little Blue Squares"? I like quadrille paper. Some would say I obsess about it. I was thinking about that on my run this morning - my earliest memory of seeing quadrille paper. I was in my early teens. It was a French movie, I can't recall title or actors or even the plot. It was old, in black and white and shot in the late 50's or early 60's. At one point, the well dressed young hero of the movie reaches into the inside pocket of his suit coat and takes out a little notebook and opens it to quadrille lined pages and writes a note. I remember thinking that it was a cool notebook and that I would like one.

My dad traveled a lot and I asked him, on his next trip to Europe, if he would try to find something like that. Sadly, he thought that a client's give-away date book would do and while it was nice, it wasn't the same.

Here's some background. I am left handed. Sort of. I eat left handed and when I used to smoke, I smoked left handed. Most other things, I do right handed. But I write left handed. When I was going to school, they taught the Palmer method. My elementary school teachers didn't know how to teach that to a lefty, so they didn't try. As a result, I had awful handwriting. I remember thinking, when I saw that notebook, that it would help me have better handwriting because the little blue squares would help with spacing and height.

My handwriting was so bad that for years, I didn't use script. Certainly when I was in the Navy, copying intercepted communications, I never used script. My supervisors prohibited it once they saw my handwriting. So I printed. In the Navy style, I just printed everything as block, capital letters. The initial capitals were just slightly larger than the rest. I was pretty good at that, fast and neat and in later years, it evolved into "connected printing" which was readable and faster. I would have never got through graduate school without that.

Once I started using quadrille paper (which was almost universally called "graph" paper then) when I was in undergraduate school, I never stopped. But finding quadrille in any size other than 8 1/2 x 11 inches was almost impossible in the US. No pocket notebooks were available. I even when I went to a printer to see about having some made, but the cost was prohibitive, even to someone as obsessive about as I was.

Years later, as my fiance (now my wife) and I were planning our honeymoon trip to the Caribbean. We didn't want to go to St. Thomas or Jamaica - after a lot of research we decided on St. Martin, a half-Dutch, half-French island near Anguilla. And that's when I looked up papeterie, the French word for a stationary store.

I found one, in Marigot, the capital city of the French side and I spent a lot of time there. There, in this one busy little store, were all the quadrille I wanted. Plus pens, like blister-pack Watermans, and Pentel Ball B50s, a distinctly European roller ball that looks cool, so I bought a handfull of them. Then I discovered I can't write with them. It only writes well at a pretty upright angle - like a right handed person uses.

I do distinctly recall the US Customs agent in New York looking at our customs declaration and saying, in a questioning voice, "Ninety bucks on stationary items?"