The other day I was going through an old childhood trunk I call my Trunk o’ Memories when I came across some of my trip diaries from the ‘60’s. My husband and I sat down, read through them and had a great laugh. Back in the day, my frugal mom would put $25 in an envelope for each day of travel, all road trips, of course. That $25 covered all expenses for me and my mom and dad, including gas and the motel. I duly recorded said expenses in the diary and some days we even had a buck or so left over to add to the next day’s envelope. The diaries brought back so many memories of the places we visited (mostly the northeastern U.S. – we were from Toronto, Canada), the ‘60’s era, my thoughts at the time, and the weather. Yes, I also recorded the daily temperature and precipitation.
I had forgotten about those diaries this summer when we embarked on an epic family road trip where I once again kept a daily diary. This time I tapped away on my iPad in my Pages app. I call it epic. Think eight people in a GMC Yukon SUV, three of them six years old and under, on a road trip up the California coast to Portland, Oregon, and back. We stopped along the way (many times), had some fun and some not-so-fun adventures, went through a lot of diapers, laughed and cried (sometimes it was me), and I duly recorded it all. Yes, including the weather.
What I’d done back in the day and now, was journaling. As I wrote in my journal before bed last night, I realized that I have always journaled. But why? Why did I feel the need to record the daily routines, the life-altering events, my thoughts and feelings, the weather? I’m sure it was not just to place these things in the historic record, to be read twenty or thirty years from now.
Remember that secret diary with the tiny key you kept as a teen, the one your bratty little brother read excerpts from to all his friends? You snatched it from his grubby hands and wrote that night,
Dear Diary,
I’m going to strangle my brother and stuff his body into his stinky gym bag!
That was journaling. Admit it. You felt a darn sight better after venting. And so, that’s why I journal. I feel better afterward. I throw down on the page my innermost thoughts, my deepest feelings, loves and hates, hopes and dreams. For my eyes only.
I think everyone knows this about journaling. But when I was researching the subject, I came across a website that listed no fewer than 100 benefits! Check it out at www.appleseeds.org/100_journaling.htm.
Conquering National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)
I majored in English in college—I have always loved stories. I can’t even remember now what my period of interest was—maybe 19th century English and French literature? That sounds reasonable. I read a fair number of novels, plays and…poetry. Yes, I fondly recall a seminar in French symbolist and surrealist poetry.
Homework was reading poetry, and I remember how first I’d just read an assigned poem. Then I’d go back and look up all the words I didn’t know or understand and translate it. Then I’d read my crude translation to try to understand the sense of the individual words and the vision of the poem. Read it again trying to internalize the meaning of the words as I read them. Read it again out loud to hear the language. It took hours to read a few lines of text on a page!
While I was wrestling with this class, I remember going to some event and chatting to two somewhat inebriated English graduate students and explaining that really, I just didn’t get all the hoopla about poetry. And having them earnestly explain that poetry was it. The pinnacle. The point. The Ultimate in the pantheon of literature….
I didn’t buy it. I figure they just liked to lord it over us lowly undergraduates and needed to pick something obscure and difficult (indeed often impenetrable) and pretend they understood the secret language, and others lacked the refined ear and were not worthy of the key to unlock this treasure. ENC (Emperor’s New Clothes) I thought. Nothing there.
Flash forward several years. Had broken up with my college/post college boyfriend, moved to New York, gotten a job. But I was still connected with our collective friends when I found out from other sources that he was getting married to a woman who had banned all of his former friends (our friends) as a pre-condition. He had to give them all up for her, and he did.
I felt compelled to write to him. It couldn’t be any kind of lengthy explanation of my disappointment in his actions: his willingness to betray long term friends to satisfy an utterly inappropriate perception of threat. To roll over and allow for such bad behavior. To not stand up for himself. To be so utterly lacking in integrity. No. No explanations.
It had to be brief–no more than 3 sentences. Expressive. Dignified. Ruthless.
I wrestled with words. Wrote and rewrote. Crafted my note. Every word had to have resonance, had to have it’s own integrity and then when juxtaposed to another, and another, create a new and nuanced meaning. I flashed back to my conversation on Poetry and realized…
Poetry is it.
It is the challenge of packing the world in a thimble, of making each word do double, triple duty or more. Of creating a multifaceted object that you can turn and turn again, see through it, see yourself in it, see other dimensions within it. Within yourself.
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