KEEPING A JOURNAL

                                                        KEEPING A JOURNAL

Keeping a journal is more than writing down simple things like what happens that day although that's pretty much what I do. It's not exactly like practicing cursive as a young student or writing spelling words ten times. It's more like musicians singing or playing the scales or simple songs to limber up. Keeping a journal not only chronicles your life, but it limbers up your writing skills the way jogging slowly before running limbers your muscles. At least that's my opinion.

I started journaling when I was fourteen. I used a three-ring binder and wrote pages and pages on notebook paper. When I grew up and had teenagers of my own, I was going to remember what it was like to be a teenager. Or so I thought. I kept it up until I graduated, got a job, met my future husband and got too busy. That ended my journaling until my sister-in-law, Joanne, gave me a journal for Christmas in 1981. The inscription read: To Gloria, to gather your thoughts, your prayers, and your memories. I misplaced it and diddn't find it until March 1982. I was in my second semester of college, and my first entry detailed winning the Virginia Perryman Award for freshmen writers. I not only won $60.00 - quite a bit at that time - but also was recognized at an Award Ceremony at Kent State in April.

From that entry I'd like to say I continued a daily journal, but I didn't. I wrote one entry several days later, skipped a year, added a few more entries then skipped three years until after I graduated from college and had been teaching for a while. I didn't start keeping a steady daily journal until the spring of 1989, and I've faithfully written almost every day since that time.

My journals are not filled with beautiful prose nor are there fanciful flights of poetic thoughts. They're mostly prosaic entries listing what I did that day or the day before. Sometimes I write about feelings or ideas I have, but it's not anything future historians would be interested in. It's good I have no illusions about becoming a famous writer someday.

However, when I've gone back to the beginning journals as I did for this blog, I'm reading things I'd forgotten. I regret that I didn't keep a journal when my children were growing up. Fortunately, I wrote letters to my three sisters when they were away at college. My sister Elaine saved the ones I sent her and put them in a scrapbook for me later. She made a beautiful quilted cover for it and gave it to me one Christmas. It was one of my favorite gifts because I read things about my children that I'd forgotten. I didn't remember until I read the letter that my youngest daughter, Mary, had trouble differentiating between frogs and toads and called them froads.

In my journals, I also write on the inside covers every book I've read, the author, and a line or two of my opinion of the book. I also keep a gardening journal during gardening season. The is even more prosaic than my regular journal.

My journals may all end up in a dumpster someday, but then again maybe not. Maybe my children and grandchildren someday will be interested in them. Probably not, but sometimes I like going back to older ones like the one in which I detailed my battle with a skunk. And as for that 3-ring binder journal I kept as a teenager? It go wet when our basement flooded long before my kids were teenagers. Maybe that's why I wasn't the perfect mother a teenager could wish for, or maybe it was because I had four teenagers at one time. Boggles the imagination, doesn't it?

Have you ever tried keeping a journal? Have you used your journals as research for your novels?