The Journals

Los Angeles, California

Once, under a mild threat of a brushfire, I packed up the essentials on the outside possibility that that I might have to evacuate. I packed my laptop, the best of my jewelry, a bottle of scotch, and a box of journals. About forty years worth of journals. I placed it all by the back door near the garage. Sometime later I thought: Clothing. Underwear! I returned to pack the second tier of essentials. But I never had to evacuate.

When I told a friend about my packing, she laughed at my having packed the journals. I thought it was an odd response. Most people will grab the photo albums as they are a chronicle of their life. My journals are the documentation of my thinking, feeling life. I started writing them when I was fourteen, following years of Dear Diary entries in those little books with tiny locks easily breached. They were sweet, with cute covers and filled with the angst of early teenaged years.  We passed notes in class about the boys and the crushes. The diary entries were like those notes. I think I like _____. I hate my teacher Mr. ______. My dad just grounded me!

My journals became spiral bound notebooks through high school and college and reflected my coming of age. High school not happy years. College much better. In my senior year of college I arranged for an independent study which was keeping journals while reading memoirs, epistolary novels, or novels styled as journals. Journals loom large in my legend.

In adult, married life, journals were kept in empty books with lined pages. They needed adequate spacing between the lines, and to open flat. Eventually, I steered away from spiral-bound. And, I rarely went back to read them. But they are there, on their own shelf in my office, a chronicle of my adult life writ small and with no covering of warts.

I have no heirs so what happens to these scores of books is a mystery. I have had people ask me about the ending of books or movies: What do you think happened next? There is no next. When it ends, it ends. Scarlett doesn't win Rhett back. Scout doesn't grow up. No one rebuilds Manderley. Because there is no longer a Scarlett. a Rhett, a Scout, nor a nameless character who marries Rebecca's killer. Turn the last page to find there is no mas. When it ends, it ends. Full stop. And that is what will happen with my story. When I am gone, it will end. The journals will most likely never be read and will end up in a landfill. So it goes.

But should there be another emergency, a box will be filled with my journals and they will be with the few things, including fresh clothing, that will evacuate with me. The photo albums can stay. To the end of my days, I will always value words over pictures. Even if they are only my words, filling all those lines in all those books. I am the odd one who thinks a word, finding that perfect word, is worth a thousand pictures. As James Cagney's character said in The Strawberry Blond: That's just the kind of hairpin I am. And I have the journals to prove it.