Photography skill: This is the date book I’m writing about with a date book in the background.

We have a wall calendar that we use to keep track of school events, doctor’s appointments, that sort of thing.

It’s the best way I can keep track of everything - it’s right there on the kitchen wall and I see it and appointments stay fresh in my mind.

I never made an adjustment to a Google calendar or some kind of digital version - scheduling is not something I’m comfortable with doing digitally.

I used to also write down every birthday on the calendar, because that’s what my mom used to do and I got used to seeing them there growing up. (I used to be so good with people’s birthdays, man. I’d remember them before I even wrote them on the calendar. But that has faded. And don’t get me started with how Facebook has devalued the skill of remembering people’s birthdays.)

So every late December or early January, part of my routine was to transfer all of the birthdays (and some wedding anniversaries) from one calendar to another.

And it got a little tedious.

But I had no better ideas for how to do this.

So last year I took one of the calendars we got (the oil company usually leaves us one) and I made it the master calendar - I put all of the dates in that one, and if a baby was born I added that person.

There were two problems though. One is that it was a 2024 calendar, so the days were only going to be accurate once every seven years or whatever, and I worried that I would miss saying ‘Happy Birthday’ to someone if I thought their birthday was going to be on Wednesday and it was really Tuesday or something like that.

The second problem is I had no good place for this weird out-of-place calendar, so it sat in a closed-off shelf and I never looked at it.

So it was not a perfect solution.

Enter this little book that you see pictured at the top of the page.

When I went to New York a couple of weeks ago, after I thought I had lost my credit card but discovered it there in the pocket of my sweatshirt, we took a relieved walk (well, my daughters were just walking and I was walking relievedly) to Urban Outfitters.

I was the last person expecting to buy anything, but I saw this book and it was perfect - it has a couple of lines for every calendar date.

The title doesn’t exactly fit - no one’s getting mad at me if I don’t remember their birthday. (And the only ones who would get upset are the ones whose birthdays I’ll never forget, so at least I still have that gift in that sense.)

But it’s really exactly what I need for this purpose - it’s small and not inconvenient to leave in a prominent place where it won’t take up too much space and won’t be noticed much until I need to use it.

It has enough room for all of the dates I need to put in there.

And it doesn’t have days of the week - it’s just the dates. So no worries there.

I took a few minutes to write down all of the birthdays (and some wedding anniversaries), and now for the rest of my life I just have to add babies when they are born.

At one time I daydreamed about filling every page of the calendar with birthdays - knowing 365 (more, based on the likelihood of people sharing birthdays) people with birthdays on every day of the calendar.

Then I realized that would be too much work to write down.

But now - well, I think maybe it’s time again to try to make that daydream a reality.