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are
mundane and trivial and hardly worth noting. I still have my
pencil-scrawled notes from one of my frst solo canoe trips, without
“parental supervision.” I was 14 and already loving my new-found
freedom, but I hardly made the most of it---my most profound
recollection of that seminal moment was, “After we ate our hot dogs
and beans, we goofed around for a while and then we went to bed. But
Bill’s toe still ails him so!”
No profundity there. Or so far, really. But I still have such great hopes for the future.
Our
ancestors have been recording and documenting their most private
thoughts and feelings for for thousands of years. Why do we do it? What
compels us to record not just the happy times but even the most
excruciating details?
them, even from the grave. In the end, most of us would prefer our journals be buried or burned (the preferred option) with us.
But
now, in the 21st Century, the hand-written journal may have seen its
better day. Laptop computers, the iPad, the cell phone and the
abandonment of handwritten texts of any kind makes the cherished
journal an endangered species.
Penmanship
alone once offered insights into a person’s character. It’s startling
to compare my own fawless cursive letters from 40 years ago to the
almost unreadable scrawl I produce now. What does that say about the
aging process or am I just in a bigger hurry? I’d guess handwriting
experts, who can glance at a note and create a psychological profle of
the scribbler, are becoming endangered as well. Who even sends
handwritten death threats anymore? They just go to Kinkos, choose a
font and ask for copies. The clerks won’t notice the content; they’re
all multi-tasking on their cell phones anyway.
And
what of the physical nature of the journal itself? This weathered
battered book that we’ve loyally carried with us and shows all the same
wear that we’ve endured along the way. I think of the journal as my
empathetic traveling com-panion...its bruises are mine as well. Here is
the aspen leaf from 1973 that I gathered in the La Sal Mountains...Here
THE DEATH OF THE HANDWRITTEN JOURNAL?
On
the frst day of 1892, my great-great grandmother, Mary Conrad Montfort,
opened a thin leather-bound journal and turned to its frst page.
Dipping her pen into a small bottle of black ink, she began to write:
“Amidst
the changing rounds of my life, I have often thought that I would keep
notes by the way, but the busy cares of life which has surrounded me,
has left me no time.
“Now
at the age of 66 I will now try and do what I long ago ought to have
done. It is now 1891. The year which has just closed has been one full
of sorrow, sickness and death. My brother John left us last April for
the better world, then the twins, his grandchildren who had made my
home their home, left me to live with their grandfather Mr. C.B.
Pan-aos.”
So, for better or worse,
we journal keepers choose to rebel
against Time,
we pick at our wounds
and we try to pull
the breadth of our lives,
warts and all, close to our hearts.
Why
this particular moment, so late in her life, fnally inspired her to
record what remained of it, I will never know. But somehow, after more
than half a century of experiences, both happy and sad, Mary wanted to
preserve them, at least for herself.
She
cheerfully took note of the good times: “I came to visit my son Willie.
How many times I had wanted to come. Now I am at his home. Have been
here 4 months. I spent Christmas and New Years, how Willie has enjoyed
it! How delighted the little ones were with their presents...”
Among
the “little ones” was my grandfather, Frank Warren Montfort, who was
born in Concordia, Kansas in 1882 and died almost 90 years later, in
1969. But, on that December morning, he was only nine years old.
For
the next fve years, Mary Montfort turned frequently to her journal, to
record not just the facts and fgures of her life, but the joy and pain
those events—those memories—caused. She notes the arrival of her
grandson:
Perhaps
we fnd a strange comfort in being able to recall the banalities and
tragedies of our lives, as well as the triumphant days—those rare times
when everything went right... It keeps those fading moments closer. Why
should we pick and choose our “history?” If we want to remember, we
need to remember all of it.
Some
fool once said that, “Time heals all wounds,” but I’m not sure healing
has anything to do with it—Time simply causes (or allows) us to
forget. It may be the ultimate survival factor in our chemistry. The
hard edges of our memories soften, the sting of painful fashbacks
subsides. It gets blurry.
So,
for better or worse, we journal keepers choose to rebel against Time,
we pick at our wounds and we try to pull the breadth of our lives,
warts and all, close to our hearts.
“Aug
12th. It was May 12 when I last wrote, three months have passed since I
came to Burlington. It seems but yesterday that I arrived here. I was
with Bell through her confnement. She felt that Mother must be with her
in her coming Motherhood and now the looked for little one has come to
us and it is a little boy. Bell is a happy mother and the boy is a very
fne child. He makes my 16 grandchild.”
is
the ketchup stain from a leaky burger at the Westerner Grill in 1986.
And here are the desiccated remains of a maddening little bush fy,
slammed and crushed between two pages of my 1998 Aussie journal, in
that favorite camp spot of mine in the pines along the Ludlow-Tuart
highway. Still there in repose, still properly squashed after all these
years. I’d been after that little devil for hours. He is as close to a
big game trophy as I’ll ever get.
Today, the iPad is a poor substitute as a mosquito bat and hardly an appropriate repository for a 37 year old aspen
Rarely
do our journals fnd a readership beyond their authors. It is the one
personal item no one knows what to do with, when we contemplate the
world after we’re gone. To whom do we bequeath our unbridled thoughts
and emotions? We all have our secrets and few of us want to share
Scribbling must be an inherited trait, for I’ve been keeping diaries and journals since I was 12. Most of my entries
The white man knows how
to make everything,
but he does not know
how to distribute it.
---Sitting Bull
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