On This Day over 40 Years
2019 marks the 40thyear since I began continuously keeping a journal. People “journal,” now become a verb, for a variety of reasons—for writing practice, as a way to relax, a way to work through problems, a way to remember, a chronicle of one’s life or, when we are lonely, “someone” to talk to.
For all of those reasons I’ve written over the decades but, when I look back at fragmentary journals from 1975-78 as a student at the dawn of my adult life, I see that the original inspiration was Anne Frank’s diary. I read the book based on her diary as, I seem to recall, part of a class. In it she wrote that she had friends but no one she could truly confide in. She tried to make these deeper attachments but could not—particularly in the difficult and dangerous situation she found herself in, hiding from Nazis during World War II. She gave her diary a name, “Kitty.” Of course the diary and Anne Frank’s life ended in tragedy. But her influence lives on. It was part of my original impetus, thinking that, well, if Anne Frank could manage to keep a journal in such brutal conditions certainly I could in my comparatively privileged world. Like Anne, I named my imaginary friend. I called him “Spence” based on a television program at the time whose character I admired. And I began to write, “Dear Spence….”
It didn’t last more than a few months off and on, and mostly consisted of excuses for not keeping up my journal. I also began to think that talking to this imaginary “Spence” sounded a little corny and pretentious. I threw out some of those early pages I thought seemed embarrassingly dumb, and then wrote to note that I had thrown them away.
After graduating from Minnesota State Moorhead I worked for a short time in public relations and then as a photographer, and later editor, for the Forum, Fargo-Moorhead’s regional daily. But I had lived most of my life in the Midwest. I wanted to see a different world, and thought the best time to do that would be when I was young enough to have the flexibility, the curiosity and the energy. I decided to combine my three academic specialties: mass communication, history and French (I had a double major and minor). I applied to a master’s program in European Cultural History (specializing in France and Germany) at the University of Warwick, Coventry, England. I saved money by moving back home.
When I decided to temporarily (I presumed) suspend a career in journalism to become an overseas graduate student I thought of a common metaphor. I was embarking on a voyage to the unknown, to me an abrupt and dramatic break from my past. I was alone. I didn’t know anyone in Britain. I needed a friend through my adventure, so I picked up my journal again. It began with a beautiful leather-bound diary with silk decorations that had been given to me by a girlfriend I felt sad to leave and really missed. (We broke up later, as you might imagine—a poor peripatetic student without a real job is not a great catch.) That journal you’d think would be big enough to last the year. It wasn’t. Not even close. So I moved to more plain but practical spiral notebooks. I wrote in longhand, cursive, of course, as nearly everyone during that time wrote cursive. I am left-handed and impatient, so my cursive is hard to read. Nevertheless, I didn’t care, because the journal was for me, to my “friend” and confidant. I wasn’t writing for anybody else.
As the habit became part of who I was, I continued to write. Sometimes during difficult emotional times I wrote page after page. Sometimes during difficult cultural times I also wrote page after page, offering my (now often callow-sounding and ignorant) commentary about the political or social world around me. Sometimes I didn’t write so much as I suppose I didn’t need a confidant as much. But I kept filling spiral notebooks—through my freelance years, working and teaching at Minnesota State Moorhead, graduate school at Cambridge, work at University of North Dakota, then North Dakota State University, marrying, then losing a spouse to cancer, remarrying, losing my mother and most of those relatives and teachers who guided my childhood. No one goes through life without pain as well as joy. I kept writing.
In 2005 I spent about four months alone doing research in Paris. With my first laptop computer I decided to move my journal to digital. So the last 13 years have been mostly typed.
In total, then, the journals now span 40 years. My rough estimate is that during this period I have written 4 million words. A lot of it not very interesting, for sure, but a little of it worth resurrecting.
This blog comprises the resurrections. I hope to choose excerpts spanning 40 years from on, or about the same day—On This Day, “OtD.”
In some cases I’ll change names or particulars to avoid possibility of offense.
The University of Warwick days are long gone. But the voyage continues.
OtD 