This is my third foray into the blogosphere. My son, Mr. New York, advised me that good bloggers post at least twice a week. I thought I could do that easily enough. Except. Except, that is, unless you conisder my record.
As a kid, I was given a five-year diary. It closed with a clasp and tiny lock. It never occurred to me to actually use the key to lock it. I also didn’t have much to say and seldom on the five allotted lines. My penciled scrawl, a shaky cursive, likely recorded that I had a pretty good day or – more likely – that nothing happened at all.
Since then, I’ve made sporadic attempts at keeping a record of happenings. I occasionally kept a journal through high school and college. I’ve been spurred to write at critical moments, particularly in the days immediately following September 11, 2001 and the subsequent war with Iraq.
Several months ago, as I celebrated my 60th birthday, I bought a green, leather bound journal, intending to chronicle only those events that held some significance for our family. I haven’t written since February. Since then, my husband has had (successful) surgery, our future daughter-in-law has bought her wedding dress, and No.1 Son and daughter-in-law have had their first child, our precious Michela, all journal-worthy events.
One kind of journal I have been somewhat successful at making consistent entries are my travel journals. I still have the one I kept thirty-eight years ago when we had a 5-week honeymoon in Italy. Fifteen years later, on another trip to Italy, I again made my daily reports. Even though this trip was shorter and involved small children, a brother-in-law and his fiancée, I found my voice and tone curiously similar. In the last three years we’ve had the opportunity to travel extensively. Thank goodness for my journal-keeping; otherwise I would never remember all the walks we took, cool neighborhoods we investigated, or wonderful meals we consumed. Even then, I sometimes find myself “catching up” on two or three days’ worth of entries, which inevitably results in He Who Never Forgets Anything questioning why I didn’t mention the amazing restaurant, the streetcar we took, or whatever else I omitted.
The champ of journal-keeping in our family is Mom. She has maintained daily entries for more than fifty years. Her first journals were called Daily Aides, more appointment book than journal, but there was a page for each day which was all she needed. Those first journals cost less than a dollar. Now, with the advent of Day-Runners, followed by Palm Pilots, Outlook calendars and Blackberries and with the demise of the Daily Aides, Mom spends at least twenty dollars apiece on those pristine, bound and lined pages. At eighty-two, she still has beautifully legible printing, suitable for reading in years to come.
She is the Keeper of All Information, the arbiter of any disputes over who hosted Thanksgiving last or which year I broke my collarbone in Yosemite. With five children over a span of eighteen years, she had plenty of fodder for those pages. Her sons’ and daughters’ girlfriends and boyfriends were fair game, as were eventual marriages and, sometimes, divorces. She addressed her worries with aging parents and, I’m guessing, her concerns about her own health and Daddy’s as well. It’s all there in her journal.
As eldest daughter, I’ve asked Mom to leave me those journals when the time comes. She’s warned me already that I might not like everything I read, and to please not think badly of her. I'm sure at the time she began writing, she never expected to be sharing her private toughts with her adult children or anyone else. I suspect when the time comes, I’ll just be pleased to have those carefully crafted pages of print, warts and all.
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