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| I had to clear out a lot of classical books to make room. |
When I was fourteen or fifteen I started keeping a
journal. It was only a three-ring binder with plain lined three ring note
paper. One of the reasons I kept it was so when I had teenagers, I would be
able to read it and remember how I felt as a teenager. Actually, I had good
parents, but they had rules to keep us in line which weren’t all that hard on
us. Because I was the oldest and my mother had health problems sometimes, I had
jobs to do like wash the dishes. When I complained enough, my mother told my brother,
Jerry, who was sixteen months younger than me to dry the dishes. That was even
worse because he’d snap me with the dish towel.
One day when I was sitting on the back porch steps
talking with a neighborhood boy who I was seeing. We didn’t go out on dates,
but he’d ride his bicycle down to visit. He was in my grade, a red-head with
freckles. He was the first boy I’d ever kissed .when we were making out in my
brothers old antique Model A Ford in the garage. It wouldn’t start, but he
wasn’t old enough to drive. However when he did get it to running he drove like
a crazy guy around my grandparent’s farm with me and our cousins either inside
or standing on the running board hanging on. Once my cousin Sally fell off and
the back wheel ran over her foot. Fortunately it didn’t break it..
Anyway, Tom
and I were sitting there talking when Jerry came to the screen door, locked it
and opened my journal and pretended to read it making up everything, like
saying I loved kissing Tom, and so on. Tom was cracking up laughing while I was
pounding on the locked screen door screaming for my mother who was upstairs.
When I graduated from high school and met the boy I
would end up marrying and also got a job, the journal was neglected, but I
never got rid of it. Unfortunately, years later when I’d been married with four
children already, the basement of the house my husband had built flooded on one
side, and the journal I had kept somehow had ended up on the floor and was
pretty much ruined. I’ve always wished I still had that.
Life was busy raising four children born in less
than five years with a husband who worked every day as a maintenance man and
electrician, who also started his own weekend and evening business putting up
antennas back before there was such a thing as cable TV. So any writing I did
was sending letters to my three sisters when they were in college, and taking
care of the books for my husband.
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| Just two of my journals with nice covers. |
Sometime in the early 1980s, I started keeping a
journal again. By this time I had started college and didn’t write quite as
much because I had essays to write and classes to study for. I loved college
and ended up taking extra classes especially in literature, poetry and writing.
A few years later I became single, and.I was living
in the farm house I bought when my husband had his mid-life crises and left. I
was teaching third grade then and most evenings I had papers to grade, but
usually found time to write in my journal before heading to bed. This afternoon
I counted all my journals since that first one I wrote. I have written 71
journals, and that doesn’t count the latest one I started or the gardening
journals I kept for several years. I'm starting to read some of my old journals to remember things from the past.
What made me interested in writing about keeping a
journal is the book club I belong to that gets together in December at my house
to pick books for the following year, picked the book Saint MAZIE by Jami Attenberg. Much of the book is Mazie’s journal
starting Dec. 3, 1909 and continuing until March 15, 1939. There are excerpts
from the unpublished autobiography of Mazie Phillips-Gordon, too. And scattered
throughout are brief paragraphs by people who knew her, as well as a long
eleven page entry by Mazie’s youngest sister Jeanie. All the book takes place
in New York City. I haven’t quite finished it yet because I just got it from
the library several days ago but I should have it done in the next few days. I took a picture of it but my computer was acting up again.
Do you keep a journal?
If not now have you ever kept a journal?
