A thirty-year-old marginal note just solved a translation I'd given up on

Pulled an old notebook off the shelf this morning — the kind with coffee rings and booth-scribble — and there it was, in my own hand from 1994, a marginal note about a German legal phrase I'd wrestled with for weeks back then. I'd completely forgotten I'd figured it out. The current version of me just used it to untangle a tricky passage in a memoir a friend asked me to look at. Thirty years between the riddle and the answer, and the answer was sitting in a drawer the whole time.