Journeying Through My Journals

              Awhile ago, I began generating a list of books I’ve read, and to help me along, I cycled through my journals. I started to journal when I dropped out of college for a year, just before turning twenty, and have kept at it in a very irregular way for almost fifty years now. I knew that here and there were lists of my reading. And even before I started the lists, I’d gotten into the habit of underlining titles of books, so they stood out from the texts. I wasn’t intending to actually read the journals, but I guess it was inevitable that as mentions of people and places and events caught my eye, I would be drawn in, which I was.

              My thirty or so journals were mostly still boxed, from our last move. I used art sketchbooks all those years, the ones with the black hardcovers, and thick, acid-free, unlined paper, so except for the difference in the two sizes I alternated between, they are almost identical. They can hardly be distinguished by wear and tear either, because in later years I began to carry my journals with me instead of writing all my entries at home, making them appear much like the older ones. In any case, in my search for book titles, I picked up the journals randomly, so that I bounced backward and forward through my life, which made for an odd effect. It reminded me of Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut’s character from Slaughterhouse Five, “unstuck in time” and bounding randomly through his past and future.

My journals are a wonderful thing. For several reasons. They remind me of things I’ve forgotten, including how I felt at the time of an experience, rather than how I feel about it years later, looking back. And, they provide evidence of what a lousy memory I have. Actually, not lousy at all. Just that it does its thing with the aid of some super, creative editing.

I’ve begun to think about what to do with this shelf of books, how to dispose of them. I don’t have children to leave them to, and there’s so much explicit and personal material in them, I don’t know if I’d have the courage to leave them behind if I did. A dear friend once told me about stopping journaling and burning the evidence in a bonfire, and I couldn’t imagine doing likewise. But it increasingly seems possible that I could follow that example.

But here are just a few of the precious memories I came across in my journal scan. Some were all but forgotten, and feel almost like the experiences of an alternate me in an alternate life; others got a detailing from the re-reading that brought them back to vivid life, and carry me back to their time. They make me grateful for the long years, for the experiences that pile up and continue to shape me, for good or bad. They reaffirm for me that I’ve lived a life.

Repeated mentions of a friend, Theo, who called me over and over again during a long period of struggle and sadness, just to see how I was doing, and that she was thinking of me.

A couple, in their fifties, who picked me up on a bitter cold night, as I hitch-hiked north through Cleveland one January. They couldn’t take me very far, but as they dropped me off, with best wishes, they gave me ten dollars, a bible and the remains of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On a long Greyhound bus trip, returning from a cross-country visit with my 91-year old grandmother. I wrote about a young child, Marcus, who crossed the aisle to sit with me and look out the window at I can’t remember what. He shyly accepted my invitation to sit on my lap so that he could see better, his smiling mother looking on. Could that even happen these days?

Getting the beauty of a desert for the first time, as I drove through the Yakima valley at daybreak. Then, decades later, experiencing the Negev and understanding how such a place could give rise to visions.

I bounded from the volume where I went for a 3-day holiday in San Francisco, backward, to the volume of fifteen years earlier, when I lived there for six months. Everything had changed in those intervening years. Especially me.

There was an invitation to a party I gave, with a hand-drawn map of how to get there, because I lived on a hillside, on a crooked, dead-end street. On the back is a list of all the people who came.

I awoke from a dream sobbing, my face and pillow damp from tears. I was awash in sadness from a dream I couldn’t remember. But the feeling that was predominate was relief. I hadn’t cried in years, had felt bottled up. The experience came as blessed release.

Getting off of an Amtrak train on an impulse, a couple of hours before my destination, Raleigh, North Carolina, because I recognized the name of a town as my grandfather’s birthplace. I called a distant relative whose number I happened to have. We visited, and as I left her home, she pointed to the cultivated field next to it. “Have you ever seen cotton?” she asked. I hadn’t. I picked a handful of it, and tried to connect to the spirits of un-named ancestors.

A sudden and surprising one night, sexual indulgence with a young woman I’d had fantasies about. But all the pages before and after are about another woman I was emotionally obsessed with and longing for.

Hitchhiking from Atlanta to San Francisco in four and a half days and eighteen rides. Why was I in such a hurry? My one visit along the way was disappointing. My first girlfriend. Never saw her again.

I was surprised to discover that one period of time, when I was in great personal distress over a relationship breaking down, and another period of time when I was soaring with energy and enthusiasm around my professional and volunteer work with youth, were in fact the same period of time. I never remember them that way.

Taking my Dad with me to my jazz deejay sets at the Dominion on Queen on Wednesday nights during his visit with us. Six weeks in a row. He was in his eighties at the time, and still a charmer and a flirt. For years after that, whenever I ran into regulars from those days, they asked about him and told me what a kick he was.

When I was just starting to write, and was frustrated at my inability to imagine strong plots, I was given a story in a dream. It was complete, beginning to end, and I immediately wrote it down, marveling at the ways of creativity.

Being laid over in Chicago's O'Hare airport for about three hours in the early, early morning. I hopped on the subway heading downtown and was soon on the elevated track going through a working-class neighborhood waking to the day. I got off and had breakfast at the counter of a greasy-spoon, thinking: “These people have no idea that I’m an alien, briefly touching down.”