Diaries
“I found her diary underneath a tree”
Wow, talk about an anachronism.
The first line of the number-one single “Diary,” recorded by Bread in 1971, certainly speaks volumes about how far we have come with regard to journal-keeping.
The singer thinks he has found the diary of a girl professing a secret love for him; however, she is actually writing about someone else, as the vocalist shares near the end of the song.
Does anyone actually write in diaries anymore? Two recent episodes illustrate, for me, reasons why we shouldn’t!
Empires have been won and lost by information uncovered in diaries. Likewise, generations of children have enjoyed reading what their parents may have written in theirs.
My wife went into a brutal cleaning frenzy this past weekend and discovered her teenage diaries in a storage box.
I pretended not to be jealous, but reading about loves of long ago made me feel strangely defensive, as if someone were invading my territory. She wrote down everything that went on back in the day. And since she came from a military background, she moved around a lot and changed schools during her middle and high school years, which added to the gumbeaux of experiences she’d already had growing up in the big city of New Orleans.
I remember finding my mother’s diary from the mid-1960s: in a memorable entry, a boy she liked held the water fountain for her one day, and carried her books to class on another. I could hear the theme music to “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” playing in the background, and imagined a black-and-white scene at her high school as I perused her musings.
My mother recently had an episode of what she calls “ruthless” cleaning at home. This is what she calls it when she goes through keepsakes and other saved items, and finds a new place for them in the garbage or giveaway pile. I am assuming she kept her diary, but embarrassingly, she unearthed a diary in which I’d written from the late 1980s through the early 1990s.
Needless to say, my diary was far less polite, and way more descriptive, than my mom’s. I think I must have been trying to impress a future reader with tales of withering desperation and the occasional conquest. And what was with all the death poetry?
She handed it to me, and when I saw the book I knew that she had been reading it. Red-faced humiliation blanketed me, and I soon found myself reliving things I wish I’d never written.
One thing I found humorous in the diary was that my high school best friend and I maintained what we called a “Drawer O’Sin”. It was the bottom desk drawer in my bedroom, and we kept a pack of Marlboros and an empty bottle of MD 20/20, both of which I had found behind the grocery store where I worked. It is important to note that we never sampled either item, but rather kept them around for the appearance of evil!
I wrote about my high school sweetheart, now married to one of my college fraternity brothers and living a few miles away, but in 1991 the object of endless adoration. There were dried rose petals from the boutonniere I wore on my tuxedo at the prom. The gloom-and-doom of death poetry in the style of Pink Floyd gave way to lyrics so romantic, they could have been written by Richard Marx and performed by Michael Bolton.
My diary was so embarrassing and disgusting to me, it found its way to a place my mother’s and my wife’s never did – the trash. As for the Drawer O’Sin, it lived on as the baby changing table, where baby wipes and diapers took the place of the things I used to hide in the hopes someone would find them.
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