E tells me about life in the depression. She was born in 1915 and grew up on a farm. They had a horse and buggy. She did the family ironing, including her father's shirts, using a flat iron heated on the wood burning stove. They moved to the city of Bakersfield when she was 8. Her father couldn't get carpentry job, and moved out. Her mother supported the household because she was very good with the needle and "could make a poor figure look good." Her mother was also a Christian Scientist. After the war she lived in Germany. She's been married twice, once to a chemist who worked in the radiation labs and played viola.
I've heard all of these stories so very many times, I could easily write a novel about it.
Then, there are my own stories. I have travel journals for any trip that lasted more than a week (unless it was a Christmas trip home.) I have the journal I kept when my sisters and I visited our 93-year-old aunt, shortly before she had to move out of her home. There's my first trip to Europe with B, right after college. The trip to Australia with K, where I met R. The 2nd trip to Europe with B. The trip to Italy to visit A and then meet up with V in France. Another France trip with V. A third France trip, followed by a boat ride through the Channel Islands and a train ride up through Wales to Cumbria: the Millennial Goldsworthy trip. The visit to Yorkshire and London when my niece was studying abroad for her junior year. Mexico and Hawaii with D. Ad infinitim.
But now I'm not doing much external traveling. This blog has been chronicling the internal journeys for the last few years, and I'm not sure how much more of that I want to think about. Recently I sent extremely despairing letters to friends, even more despairing than the blogs I've been writing, which my friends and family also read. It might be useful to have the journals to look back on, but what's the point in worrying people who love you?
When my sister E retired (early), she started keeping a journal. It's more a date book than a journal: she wanted to be sure that she had some sense of accomplishment, now that her life was no longer going to be scheduled around a work week. My friend H (writer/reader extraordinaire) posted Lynda Barry's description of the 4-minute diary:
Why is it so hard to keep a diary?
IT ISN’T!
Keeping a diary is much easier if you limit your writing to four minutes each day: two minutes spent writing a list of what you remember from the day before and then two minutes making a list of things you saw.
I do a version of that, by posting pix and haiku regularly to my facebook account. It's a way to let myself and others know that I'm alive, and that things are basically okay.
C says I'm a writer, and have always been one. But I think that I'm really a frustrated storyteller. I'm not good at it, and I need a patient audience. D used to interrupt me constantly, and then I'd be silenced and go pouting off to my morning pages or blog and spew out my thoughts, complete with a dose of whine. That's not writing, though. It's processing. I need to feel like I'm alive, like I'm doing something. I need to feel like I'm connecting with someone. So, I blog, and I post, and I look for the comments and the "likes" and I re-read what I wrote a year ago and I think....have I progressed at all?
At one time I kept my morning pages religiously, and I also ticked off activities from the online record, Joe's Goals. These were more private: only I saw them. The morning pages were often laundry lists of things I needed to do, as well as things that made me feel bad about myself as well as rants about D or about work. The goals were things like walking, knitting, origami, writing letters, tai chi chuh, practising, drinking 8 glasses of water, crafting, lifting weights, yoga....a mix of creativity and self-care. It was like giving myself gold stars.
Now I'm at a place where work does not distract me, but I have nothing to say. The stories really do depend on an active life. So....let's see about that four minute diary.
- D came in at around 5:45 with tales of wrecks and horrible traffic in Santa Fe. I determined to take 599 to rehearsal.
- M gave me keys to the SF office and we talked about early music, the coop, and caregiving. She said that it took a friend of hers a full year to get the caregiving organized for his parent, and that he wound up with two full-time caregivers. Another friend had 4 caregivers. All for one person. It's a darn expensive proposition.
- I got the code to 1st presbyterian church back door, so next time we rehearse there I don't have to stand in the cold until another person arrives.
- Driving to SF in the dark featured a beautiful crescent moon. After rehearsal, it was low and yellow on the horizon.
Okay, that's over two minutes.
- I saw the moon.
- I saw Venus, bright over the mountain as the sun set. The mountain was blue-black and craggy.
- I saw rocks and dirt as I dug out rocks and continued to create the labyrinth.
- golden sun, blue sky
- a spider, drowning in the shower water (I took it outside, crumpled and dead looking on a magazine. It was gone 20 minutes later
- dust on a picture
- lots of zits on my face. :(
And that's over two minutes, too. I seem to remember a lot of banal things. But, it is proof that I am alive, I guess.
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