Spilling Secrets: An Old Woman’s Diaries

 

Three times in the past I’ve written posts about and have tried to purge over 45 years worth of diaries out of my life. I was twelve when I wrote in my first diary: “Today we had a spelling test and I funked it.” It was a black faux leather, five year diary and after that I had a one year, green book that I filled with movie playbills and boy crushes. Then I discarded the idea of using official diaries and I switched to using red and black books with blank pages from the office supply store. I was able to buy that same style from the mid ‘50s through to the new century. With some of the earlier, boy crazy volumes it took two books to get through a year. Later volumes compressed 3-4 years in each book. By the time I’d discovered blogging as my new form of diary keeping my last red and black book had only yearly entries for entire decade of the 2000s.

The fact that I’m back here writing about my old diaries again is all the proof you need that my three attempts to finally let go of them were dismal failures. I kept getting sentimental over reading through them and I'd decide the purging could wait until another day that never came. Until this week. Well sort of---I compromised with myself. Half are gone, half will get moved with me. I kept the ‘50s through 1960 when I was still an innocent kid. A boy crazy kid to the core if you can believe the ramblings of a teenage virgin who thought she was destine to never find true love. (Didn't give up my V-Card until I was twenty-five, in case anyone is asking,) Not much was on those pages that could hurt anyone’s feelings should family read them after I’m gone, not much of anything is in them which begs the question: Why can’t I let them go? I’m thinking maybe it’s because they show how much I’ve grown, expanded my mind, my writing abilities and interests in life? As a side note, do you find it as curious as I do that I’m back to looking for true love again, only this time I'm looking in the pages of romance books? The more things change the more they stay the same.

I also shredded the travel journal I blogged about not long ago, but I kept one later diary volume, 1970, the year I met my husband. Trust me, it was not filled with hearts and flowers and puppy dog tales. We had a rocky beginning to our relationship. I was more interested in his friend---we all met at the same time---who I was also dating and it was 4-5 months before Don and I got around to being exclusive. I think I kept that volume to remind myself of how much our relationship grew over the decades to come. We'd both been in serious relationships before we met that, for me, ended badly and took me to dark places. Don was fighting demons of his own. Eventually it won't be hard to shred that diary like I managed to do with the rest of the ‘60s through the ‘90s. Just not this year. I still have some lessons to learn from that tumultuous year.

One of the reasons people keep old diaries is an attempt to understand our pasts and how they influence our present. And I'm proud of myself for purging the diaries documenting the year I fell head over heels in love with the guy I dated before Don and the dark year after we broke up when the phrase "one-night stands" could have applied a few too many times. I thought he was my forever guy and for a while he thought the same way about me and it broke my heart into million pieces when it was over. Since my last attempt to purge that era of diaries I did a deep dive into a collection of letters written back and forth to Vietnam and I found the understanding I needed, of how much the Vietnam War played a heavy hand in our break up. We met through those letters and he serviced five tours of duty over there before we started dating. Looking back with an old woman's wisdom I finally realized the breakup was not about me...or him. It never was, and just like that I made peace with the hurt and found the healing I needed. At last, it was easier than I thought it would be to tear those two books apart and put the pages through the shredder.

In 1999 I had gone back to using a one year diary that documented my last year out of five of share-caring my dad and his dementia and trying to balance the time spent with him, working and my life with Don. It was not a pretty picture. I was always sleep deprived and stressed out and that diary was filled with tensions and arguments with my brother. And imagined or not, I felt like my share-caring---being away from home three days and two nights a week to be with my dad---was pulling Don and I apart emotionally. He was still there for me when ever I needed his help with Dad or whatever but our time for fun and recreation fell by the weigh-side and was being filled in his life by a neighbor couple. I was jealous. 

This week as I read through that 1999 book it became the first one to hit the shredder. I didn’t want my nieces to one day find it and see their father and me in a bad light. And I’ve never been that person who talked negatively about a significant-other or spouse. That’s what diaries are for and I didn't want my nieces to see me doing The Snitty Dance just because Don essentially had time to laugh and play with the neighbors when I didn't. Those neighbors, by the way, turned out to be good time Charlies because after Don's massive stroke they rarely came to visit and that really hurt Don.

Crazy to say this but those five years of share-caring my dad are what I'm most proud of. I met a hard challenge and helped give Dad the best life a guy with lung cancer and dementia could have and yet you'd never know that, reading that one year diary. Some of my best memories of my dad happened that year but I never wrote a word about them in real time. The diary had to go so the a glossy "re-write" of my personal history doesn't get contradicted by a book filled with the writings of a woman who was clearly holding on by her fingernails to her world spinning out of control. To my nieces my caregiver crown will still be a shiny example for the same challenge they've recently taken on for their dad.

Marie Kondi in one of her books on downsizing said no one should own more than 30 books and we’re to keep them in a box in a closet. Ideally she thinks we should just tear out the pages we like in a book and throw out the rest. (Clearly she's not a reader.) I really dislike that woman but I actually followed her advice during my diary purging project. Mostly I kept some of the preambles that I wrote each year. God, some of them are so pretentious that they make me laugh. They would have been great preambles if I’d turned out to be famous. Just goes to show that teenagers and twenty-somethings don’t know squat. But of all the pages I want to save---and there were less than a dozen---the diary entry I love the most after a reading marathon that covered so many years of my life is still my “I took a spelling test today and I funked it” written in 1955. If I every purge that diary I will frame that page and hang it near my computer because I am still a notoriously bad speller. ©

Note: Sorry this post is long. I couldn't decide what 300 words to cut to keep within my self-imposed 1,000 word quota. It was also somewhat liberating to spill all my secrets at once and let the chips fall where they may.

The diary box before the purge. The notebooks on the right are filled with bad poetry I wrote .

Diaries - The 1950s

I know what you’re thinking. How many times is that woman going to moan and groan about disposing of her old diaries before she actually does it? Last night I took a five year diary out of the metal box where I keep them all with the intention of giving it a last read. It was a quick read because only two of the five years were filled in and those five year diaries don’t give you a lot of room to write in. I was thirteen and fourteen when I wrote in that book and it isn’t my only diary from the decade. I have three others from the '50s but only one is a single year diary and I’m pretty sure that will be the only diary I end up keeping and therefore I don't need to read it now. It has handbills from all the movies I saw attached to the pages but otherwise it's the diary of a naive and typical boy-crazy teenager.

I’m planning to pull out a few highlights from each of my diaries from the 1950s through the '90s before THE BIG PURGE and I’ll catalog those highlights into something brief but readable, maybe even bloggable. The project will occupy evenings deep into the winter when in past years I would have been knitting in my La-A-Boy. I just can't decide if I should do the project this winter or next. The advantage of waiting is I should have all my sellable stuff gone by then and while reading old diaries is entertaining it feels like I'm wasting valuable time. It's a hard decision. I'll finish reading the 1950s before I decide. At least that much will be done and waiting for the 'fire ceremony.'

Reading the five year diary, the first thing that stands out is what an atrocious speller I was. I already knew that because my "creative" spelling got me labeled 'stupid' when I was growing up. But I had to laugh at how many days the only entry I made was: “I didn’t do ‘inething.’” And I ‘red’ instead of read, went to the ‘liberly’ instead of the library and I always used the word ‘agent’ for again. One of my favorite misspellings is my cousin got ‘mariaged.’ And no matter how many times I try to decipher what I was trying to say when I wrote, “I walret tevletion” I can’t figure it out. Another puzzling entry in the diary was, “I didn’t go to church today because I didn’t get soup.” Say what? I'm seriously thinking of starting another five year diary on day one in my new place. I have Alexa to help me with spelling now and at my age any confusing sentences would get chalked up to dementia setting in.

Speaking of church, I was shocked with how many times I wrote that I had gone to church and to something called B.C. Fellowship. In my memory I thought I left all my church-going days back in early grade school when they used a flannel board to hold paper cut-outs to tell Bible stories. Now I’m trying to figure out if spending two years in my early teens going to church and B.C. Fellowship influenced my current (and often negative) attitude toward religion or if that came later. I’ve been thinking a lot about religion in recent months---and that shocks me, too. I’ve been following the newsletter from the parent company of Continuum Care Campus where I’ll be moving to get a sense of the types of activities that are available at their other two campuses. They have a Creative Writing Circle and the submissions I've read lean towards Godly topics. And I will probably be going to a lot of church choral performances around the holidays. No surprise there since these places are non-profits supported by a foundation through the United Methodist Church. And I’ll probably be making handcrafts to donate to their do-good projects. Fine by me. If I’m going to live there, I’m going to jump into the culture with both feet until/if I have a reason to pull back.

Back to my diaries. I got my first pair of nylons in the mid ‘50s and I wore them with a pink junior bridesmaid dress and silver shoes when my cousin got "mariaged." I thought her new husband was the “perfect husband” and boy was I a poor judge of character back then. He left her with a bunch of little kids, skipped the state and never looked back. Another highlight was I had my second crush on a boy named Gene. (My first crush was on Gene Autry in my pre-teens.) March 12^th the boys at school threw snowballs at me and on April 10^th I wrote: “We had a play for the grownups at school. I was an "Itay’ girl” aka an Italian. That was no stretch, given I was one of the very few dark haired kids in a sea of blonde-headed Dutch kids that I went all the way through school with. 

Reading the five year diary I also realized that I was a busy kid. I was always going off to ice skate, roller skate, dance class, see a movie or go tobogganing. I was in Campfires and I still have my beaded merit vest which probably doesn’t surprise anyone. I also went to three “sleep parties” and even hosted one of my own. Many of my entries were simply “I worked today” but I never expanded on what exactly that meant. I remember having chores like ironing, cleaning the house, mopping floors and working in the yard. I also babysat a set of twin cousins often and I took swimming lessons at the YWCA. The latter of which surprised me when I read it because I spent summers on a lake from the time I was three and I learned to swim long before my early teens. Why did my mom think I needed to go to the YWCA, especially since it involved taking a bus downtown? Details, little Jean, didn't you know your older self would want them?

As I was reading the five year diary I saw a news clip on TV about climate activist Greta Thunberg being named Time's Person of the Year. It made me sad to compare my carefree youth to hers. Kids today have to grow up too fast. They do active shooter drills in school and worry about terrorist attacks and the world being inhospitable to humans in the not so distance future. I deeply regret that the world they are inheriting has so many serious problems to solve but at the same time I'm proud of them and feel they are up to the task. Their social media version of my '50s diaries will be filled with more details and 'red meat' than mine, right down to photos of what they ate at their first Save-the-Planet rally.  ©

The junior bridesmaid.

Yes, I still have all my school report cards. What I lacked in spelling I made up for in penmanship.

Holiday Break, Cowboy Outfits and Diaries

I’m winding down my e-Bay sales until after the holidays, maybe even for the whole winter and that's a good thing because I’m getting burned out and need a break. Since I started in the spring I’ve had great sales and good, trouble-free customers but the cigarette related collectibles I’ve been selling this month are attracting a lot of people in China and I don’t ship overseas. The e-Bay software and my settings there are supposed to filter out people without a U.S. address and stop them from bidding, but it doesn't stop them from sending a lot of messages in broken English wanting me to change my settings so they can bid or to buy the items directly without bidding at all. It’s not like they don’t have other choices if they really want to bid on my stuff. There are several large import/exporters on our coastlines that place bids for overseas e-Bayers. If they win, the exporter pays the seller who ships the item to them and they reship the items to the overseas buyers. The Chinese collectors apparently have deep pockets to be able to pay for this service plus they always outbid the American collectors. I don't mind selling to the import/exporters but the only unpaid auctions I've had all year have come from selling cigarette related collectibles and it's a long, drawn out pain-in-the-butt process before you can relist your items.

My last new listings were on Sunday so I’m in the wind-down phase and should have all twenty of my current e-Bay auctions closed and shipped before the post office turns into a Christmas Crazy-Land and I'm more than ready to shift gears. Next up on my downsizing schedule is deep closet purging my coat closet. I have seventeen coats and jackets in there---including one that is at least 35 years old and, yes, I still wear it. It's my go-to-coat for in between fall and winter. My goal is to end up with two coats for winter, two for summer, two for fall and two for rain.

I also have six Pendleton wool shirts in that closet---all classic cut westerns and I’d planned to sell the shirts on e-Bay. New they go for $149 and used I could get $35-45 each. But I don’t want to deal with people returning stuff for size so I’m trying to talk myself into giving them to Goodwill along with the coats. It's killing me to let go of the Pendleton’s. The $200 to $270 I could sell them for is hard to ignore plus I'm afraid if I donate them I'll see one of them on a homeless person. Don was the type of person who would have given a needy person the shirt off his back, but apparently I'm not. I'm too wrapped up in how he looked in them. His idea of dressing for fun and feeling good was a pair of Levis, a plaid Pendleton shirt, his Stetson cowboy hat and his Tony Lama cowboy boots. In his prime he was a head turner and I think of him every time I hear Dolly Parton singing:  

“Ooh, Why'd you come in here lookin' like that

In your high heeled boots and your painted-on jeans

All decked out like a cowgirl's dream…

Why you're almost givin' me a heart attack

When you waltz right in here lookin' like that.”

I’m not looking forward to the winter, hold up inside the house with lots of purging to do that is sure to take me back in time, a necessary place to go in order to move forward to my next chapter. One of the purging projects I have to do is to dispose of a lifetime of diaries. I’ve tried doing it a couple of times in recent years but I got lost in doing the “last” read-through and decided there was still value in keeping them. This time is different though, since I’ll be going to an independent living, continuum care campus where strangers could end up going through my stuff, if I have to move on to their Memory Care or Hospice building. Not sure how that works. I suppose they give your family x-number of days to clear your stuff out but who knows if my nieces be in a position to do it when the time comes. At one continuum care place I toured before picking this one out, they had an area where they sold the furniture and stuff left behind by residences. It made me sad in a way that going to estates sales never did. At least with estate sales, I always believed the family went through stuff before the public was invited in and could discover that aunt Florence kept a thirty year old flow chart of her periods. Some things aren't meant for strangers to ponder or make fun of. By the way, I don't have an ancient flow chart but I do have a list of every guy I've ever kissed. Just sayin'.

I wish I had a fireplace to burn my diaries in. Somehow that seems like a more fitting ending than sending the books off to recycling or worse yet, to the landfill with the trash. They burn old, worn-out flags with a ceremony that honors the purpose they served. There should be a ceremony when letting go of decades of your recorded daydreams, venting and jumbled thoughts. The diaries helped me learn how to sort out my feelings, how to keep secrets and they taught me how to write stream-of-consciousness style that I often do in this blog. I need a more fitting ending to my set of black books with the red spines than sending them off in a garbage truck or dumping them into the recycling roll-off at the county collection center. I’ve got my thinking cap on, trying to come up with an alternative but it must be lined with tin fold because nothing is coming though. ©

Don's first cowboy outfit. When I was the same age I was sleeping with my Gene Autry cap gun under my pillow.