December, 1997

You know you want to write the words: "Dear Diary, it's January 1, 1998....." You have shopped for the perfect journal -- again. The ones from years past gather coffee cup rings as you glance over old resolutions, old predictions, old January firsts.

This year will be different. Okay, let's make it different! What are you after? Memories? Of course. And you've learned that the written word is just the trigger to fire up the days of your life as they were. "I would have forgotten that," you say, as you peruse old Januarys.

Once you become a willing participant in recording your life, you will not be self-conscious expressing yourself. There is no reader over your shoulder. You can either write "Dinner with friends, wore my red dress," conscious of someone reading it one day, or, you can talk to yourself, writing: "Out to dinner with Joe and Helen (jerks), wore my red dress -- I looked sooo 'hot.'" !

You can keep daily organizers with marginal notes and save the leather bound journals for heartbreak and soul searching, or you can combine your body and soul meanderings into notebooks. Writer Natalie Goldberg starts a spiral notebook a month. If she runs out of month before she runs out of jottings, she starts a new book, anyway. I tried that and have many spiral notebooks with half the pages untouched. And some that extend further.

They're my books. I can do what I want. What's missing from the blank pages are my words and often not writing triggers memories, too. All the time devoted to the right pen, the leather-bound book, is time holding you back from what you want to do: Record your life.

This is no different from my never-ending laundry problem. My journals of the seventies complain about the volume of laundry and my inability to cope with keeping seven children clean. My neighbor, Anne Marie Bedford, listened to my endless chants about the need for special hampers, laundry baskets, dividers for separating the whites from the colored things. "There MUST be a way," I wailed. Oh, the frustration! I couldn't motivate the kids to help and the dog slept on the piles of laundry in front of the washer, usually nibbling on socks.

Anne Marie looked directly at me. She spoke in the tone of READ MY LIPS. "Put two brown paper bags behind each child's bedroom door. They can sort, they can carry to the laundry room, if they are over 10, they can wash it, dry it, fold it and put it away." That sounded like a plan. It was, it worked, it was free.

The notebooks work, too. They're under a dollar. I prefer wide lines because my writing is sprawling, and, I prefer a rolling ball pen, medium point, real ink. Aside from that, only the words count and what they say to me, now or someday. Little Annie Frank did not know she was writing history. She had a notebook, she had a pencil, she had nothing to do. Circumstances of her life and times took her family to living for two years in a sealed up back room in an obscure office building in Holland. She wrote about it, describing it, because it was there. She did not say, "they will want to know how we get food," -- they being us -- "so I will tell them Mim sneaks in late at night with potatoes for us to share."

We know that bit of her life because she wrote what was happening, perhaps for no other reason than telling her children one day. It is only because the same circumstances of her life and times took on global significance, that it became poignant history and testimony to the human spirit -- but she didn't know that. If other people sharing her space and her potato kept diaries, we would see different viewpoints, if not different events. Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were diarists. To illustrate viewpoints, let me take just one day, October 27, 1938, where Anne writes about house-hunting and gardens and marble-floored dining rooms, ending her page with "There is a report in a German paper that Charles has been forbidden by the Russian Government to return to Russian soil."

Charles, on the other hand, focusing directly on one thing, writes: "Truman read a report in an afternoon German paper that the Russian government has ordered my arrest if I ever again enter Russian territory, and have designated me as an 'enemy of the people of the Soviet Union.'"

If you want to write the events of your life and record your reaction to them, you don't have to go back to the beginning. Keep a diary, now! It is what you must do now, to remember now -- later.

   

If you liked this, you'll love the book!