Day Flipper

A girl and her anything-a-day calendars.

I confess, I am nutty for those page-a-day calendars. For years, I haven't been able to be content without my Dog-a-day calendar. You know, the one where people send in pictures of their dogs, looking winsome, looking soulful, looking beautiful, looking playful, looking out over a dramatic landscape, looking goofy in a costume. Each day, there's a picture of a dog, with his name, his owner's name, where they're from, and a story, some dog-care advice, a how-about-that interesting fact, a literary quote.

One year, I didn't happen to get one at the turn of the year, and I thought I could, for once, live without it. On the contrary, I grew more and more wistful, missing my morning ritual of tearing off yesterday's page to reveal the new dog o' the day. I ended up ordering it in February, when calendars were long gone from the bookstores. And for full price, for heaven's sake -- when we're already deep into the year in question. Don't these people know that calendars are half price on January 1 and forever thereafter? Everyone knows it's the law. Well, maybe they just knew they had me over a barrel. I needed my daily dog.

But it's not just dogs. To me, there just must be something intrinsically appealing about the page-a-day format, the promise of something new and possibly exciting every single day. Plus, all those pages have a second life as a year's worth of notepaper. I get to revisit each image once more before scribbling a phone message on the back.

No, dogs for me alone were not enough. I found additional scope for my calendar-a-day infatuation in gift-giving. Wine-a-day, stupid-crook-a-day, Elvis-a-day; nobody is safe from me. One of my dear ones probably had a narrow escape at some point from a fold-your-own-paper-airplane-a-day (and I still think it sounds like fun). Whatever the topic, you name it, put it in a page-a-day format and I'm fascinated.

So imagine my excitement, about three years ago, when I first spied a Knitting Pattern-a-day calendar. An entire, brand new knitting pattern surprise every day. I was on it like a wild jackal.

I've been hooked ever since. As it happens, the actual fulfillment it provides has been mixed. Some patterns are hits, some are misses, but the anticipation of a potential knockout is always there with each new day.

Of course, the knitting pattern-a-day concept leaves you with some residue. That is, a whole lot of patterns. This calendar doesn't have that handy self-cleaning feature of trickily recycling itself as notepaper. For one thing, many of the patterns continue onto the back of the page, severely limiting the scope for scribbling. For another, knitting patterns have the quality of seeming like reference material one might want to use at some point, making them harder to throw away, if you're the accumulating type. So there's a potentially troublesome issue here. But that's a worry for another day.

Anyway. Well, of course that must mean I've given up the daily dog, right? ...right? No, that I could never do. To get my day started right, I must have my knitting pattern du jour and my dog o' day. In fact, little did I know, I had been severely deprived until then. If you can't have a page to tear off at home when you first wake up and one to get you rolling when you arrive at work, what kind of a life is that?