Essay: The First Crisis of the New Year

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Even though I had been dreading the moment all year, I fought to keep the abject terror out of my voice. "Yes, lunch on the fourth would be terrific," I burbled into the phone with false bonhomie. "I'll make a note of it right now."

But where to inscribe the first appointment of the New Year? Like a condemned man fantasizing about a reprieve from the Governor, I riffled through my woefully nondescript black vinyl 1988 Daily Planner praying that somehow it contained extra pages for the first week of January. Instead, with fear and trembling, I peered into the abyss: a blank daily entry for New Year's Eve and then no more. Nothingness. Maybe I could take the cowardly way out and try to recycle the pages from last January. But there in big block letters on the top of Jan. 4, 1988, was the chilling inscription: "In Iowa with Gephardt." Even masochism has its limits; no sane man would choose to relive the Iowa caucuses. The long-feared existential crisis was at hand; I would have to buy a new desk diary.

Only the young and the supremely self-confident could view such a task with equanimity. For as Michael Korda sagely observed in one of his treatises on modern success, "Desks can tell us a great deal about people's power quotient." Another year shackled to a black vinyl Daily Planner would be the final indictment of the drab ordinariness of my workaday life. As my power quotient tumbled beneath even that of Michael Dukakis, gone would be those wistful dreams of a corner office and secretaries heralding my daily arrival with eager chirps of "Good morning, Mr. Shapiro."

Even if it were bound in rich Corinthian leather with a silken page marker, my Daily Planner would still not be able to transcend its plebeian origins. All through 1988, I fell behind in the race to the top because my desk diary lacked the fat glossary of practical information that people like Michael Korda take for granted. It is galling to admit that I have at my fingertips neither the international dialing code for Abu Dhabi nor an up-to-date list of bank holidays in Kuala Lumpur. Even worse, I am forced to rise from my swivel chair and wander down the hall each time I need the name of the concierge at the Hotel George V in Paris. In contrast, about the only power tool my Daily Planner offers is a page of metric equivalents. Unfortunately, the last time I needed a metric crib sheet, I was standing on a bathroom scale in Italy after a huge dinner, trying to convince myself that pounds and kilograms are almost equal.

My black vinyl stigma of inferiority would, of course, vanish instantly with the purchase of the right upscale desk accessory. These days, given the vast array of choices, selecting a personal diary has become a bold and precarious act of self-definition. It is fine for Gail Sheehy in Passages to decree that "somewhere between 35 and 45 if we let ourselves, most of us will have a full-out authenticity crisis." Sure, I know it is about time for me to decide who I really am and where I fit in the cosmos. But do I really have to grapple with these conundrums now, before I go to lunch on Jan. 4?