The First Crisis of the New Year
By WALTER SHAPIRO
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?
; In a sense, psychic salvation is just an elevator ride away. In the lobby of the Time & Life Building, I can obtain an impressive desktop planner offered by our sister publication FORTUNE magazine. But I just could not imagine treating the appointment book's appendices, filled with FORTUNE 500 listings, as a personal breviary. Let others run with the bulls and the bears; the symbol of my investment strategy has always been the Cowardly Lion. To me, a term like "covering a short position" refers to St. Louis Cardinal infielder Ozzie Smith.
Luckily, my options did not stop at the lobby's edge. Virtually every magazine seems to be in the business of helping its readers mark the inexorable passage of time until their subscriptions are up for renewal. For example, I quickly skipped over a promotion for the Newsweek Pocket Diary that bills itself as "the perfect corporate gift." Not in every corporation, it isn't.
An infinitely more prudent alternative appeared to be the 1989 New Yorker Diary. The ad promises that its "50 all-time classic" cartoons will "start each day with a smile." But such an enforced daily dose of risibility struck me as being a little like wearing a lampshade at a party while completely sober. Esquire is another competitor in this smile-button sweepstakes. Its diary boasts cartoons and ads drawn from the magazine's issues of 1939. Not, however, exactly the world's most fun year. Somehow the memory of Nazi troops pouring into Poland might mar my enjoyment of next Sept. 1. Others might be attracted by the international status that instantly accompanies ownership of the Economist Desk Diary. But then, others in their youth went to England as Rhodes scholars; I had to pick up my Anglophilia during a three-day theater tour of London.
By now, I was a man possessed as I wandered the streets of midtown Manhattan questing after the appointment book that best reflected my station in life. I was briefly tempted by a Filofax until I remembered that all I needed was a datebook, not a new religion. And the Weight Watchers calendar just did not seem right for inscribing lunch engagements.
In the midst of this full-fledged identity crisis, I stumbled upon an old- fashioned, comfortable jumble of a stationery store, sort of the office- supply version of the Homesick Restaurant. In the window was a hand- lettered sign promising 20% OFF ON 1989 CALENDARS. My epiphany came as I discovered that the 1989 black vinyl Daily Planner had been marked down to $5.06. Suddenly, just as Gail Sheehy promised, I at last understood my precise position in the Great Chain of Being. As soon as I got back to my office, I eagerly scrawled in my new datebook my sole New Year's resolution for 1989: "Memorize that table of metric equivalents."