Writing It Down 

(Here’s my latest monthly column in Brazos Monthly magazine)

A row of cloth-covered journals, in various colors, stretches out for almost two linear feet on a book shelf in my study. There are twenty-nine of them, in chronological order covering forty-three years, with brief daily entries beginning on Saturday, September 5^th,1981 and continuing uninterrupted to the day you are reading this.  Provided I’m still lucid and breathing.

 You’re expecting me to now share some profound philosophical reason for scribbling over fifteen thousand entries (so far). That’s too bad; my motivation was not a bit lofty.  I started because somebody gave me a blank journal as a gift.  I don’t remember who or why. So I started writing in it.  Then I kept writing in it.

That first one (Volume I, 9/5/81 – 7/5/82) is a slender tan book with an illustration on the cover of a duck with what looks like a croquet ball in his mouth in front of crossed tennis rackets in front of an upright mallet, symbolizing  … I have no idea what. 

Over the four decades since making that first entry I’ve recorded any number of daily events, some important enough to warrant remembering, most not. But it’s been fun to look back occasionally on any given day over the years to see what the world and I were up to.  Often, probably more often than they want me to, I take a photo of a page and text it to one of our daughters or an old friend to share a memory they had something to do with.

What will happen, you’re wondering, to all my journals when I’m transported to Mr. Shakespeare’s ‘undiscovered country’?  I have no idea.  I seriously doubt the Smithsonian will want them, and used book stores are only interested in ones that haven’t been written in. I’ve just enjoyed putting something down every day and in time I came to be an avid supporter of journaling. When I was a teacher I encouraged my students to take it up. 

Early in the pandemic I wrote a guest editorial for the Houston Chronicle in which I suggested that since we would all be prisoners in our homes for no telling how long, readers should keep journals of their daily activities.  I encouraged them to write about everything, about trying to keep the prescribed distance from other people in the few stores that were still open.  About a newly discovered reverence for things as simple as toilet paper, Lysol wipes, and being able to sit down in a favorite restaurant and having a meal brought to their table. About having to substitute FaceTimeing with their grandchildren for holding them in their arms, and watching the number of the infected and the dead rise horrifically every day. And gazing out their window at a world that was suddenly a threat and feeling that their home was now a fortress, and hopefully a sufficient one.  

Because, I told them, maybe someday somebody, a grandchild or great grandchild or somebody who has no connection to them whatsoever, will come across their journal in an old trunk or in a box in an attic. They might pick it up and start reading and see the situation for what it really was – a heady mixture of aggravation, fear, concern, loneliness and hope – narrated by someone who actually lived through it. 

I ended that editorial with the following little history lesson, hoping to drive home the importance of recording important events. 

Throughout history keepers of personal journals have provided eyewitness front row seats to important events that played out around them, supplying nuances and details that historians often miss.  Julius Caesar’s numerous entries in what would come to be called his campaign books provide a unique view of as much of the world as he could conquer in the first century B.C.  And if Samuel Pepys hadn’t kept a daily diary we wouldn’t know nearly as much about a horrific outbreak of plague or the great fire of 1666 that leveled London, or the jubilant coronation of King Charles II, the ‘Merry Monarch’ whose reign would free British citizens of the severe restraints of the bleak years after the Puritan parliament removed Charles’ father’s crown (along with his head). And what better insight into the evil mankind is capable of and the quiet strength of the optimism and courage of a single human heart could we possibly have than Anne Frank’s diary? All of these are gifts to us from individuals who looked at the world they lived in and wrote things down.

So, even though our own plague has been brought down to size, I encourage you to buy yourself a blank journal, grab a pen, and start writing.  Why an actual bound journal?  Because books stay in the world, texts on screens usually don’t.  And writing thoughts down on a page just seems a better, more personal way to go about journaling.  At least for me. Jotting down an entry every night brings a sort of closure at the ends of days. 

Who knows?  If you start journaling you too might keep at it for several decades. Which means – without putting too fine a point on it – more than a few of you better get started.