Week before last, when I left the still pool of full-time employment for the more turbulent waters of freelance writing, I was given a golden pen and notebook. (Thank you, Drew!) 

The golden pen I pressed into service immediately, finding in its slim contour and smooth passage on the page a near-perfect writing implement. I’ve already used it to scribble in my journal on Day One, and it’s now sitting on my desk in a place of honor, the little crystal pineapple on its top harkening back to a many-faceted ornament a friend gave me when I set off to journalism school many years ago.

But the golden notebook is daunting. Should I reserve it for days when I feel the muse is calling with greater insistence? Should it be only for Very Important Writing or become one in a series of notebooks that are otherwise black and pedestrian?

Could I, like Doris Lessing, use it to tie together the disparate threads of my life? Unlikely. I haven’t even read Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. 

For now, the golden notebook will remain open to possibility, which is, I’m finding, a very nice way to be.

(Yesterday I discovered that the golden pen makes rainbows on the page when held outside at the proper angle.)