The Value of a Diary

I am blessed to have many good friends that I have known for a long, long time. They can best be described as falling into a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent groups, one of which I refer to as the “Delta Drama Gang” because we got acquainted when we attended San Joaquin Delta Col­lege in the mid-1970’s and par­tic­i­pated in the drama pro­gram there. We per­formed together in numer­ous pro­duc­tions before trans­fer­ring to four-year col­leges, get­ting mar­ried, and estab­lish­ing our­selves pro­fes­sion­ally. We have won­der­ful shared mem­o­ries — and a few pho­tographs — about those crazy times.

In recent years, we have made a delib­er­ate attempt to be bet­ter at stay­ing in touch and spend­ing time together, a direct reac­tion to los­ing a cou­ple of our mem­bers far too early.

I know that I am get­ting older, as evi­denced by the increas­ing fre­quency with which I have “senior moments.” Those are the very frus­trat­ing times when I sim­ply can­not remem­ber some­thing — usu­ally it is a name, but it could be a date, occur­rence, or even appoint­ment if I neglect to note it on my cal­en­dar. Last year, I appar­ently had a major “senior moment” and my friends are still teas­ing me about it.

The first time I got seri­ous about writ­ing in a diary was when I was in high school. I had a good friend named Kathy who was a gifted artist. She car­ried a sketch book every­where she went in which she not only logged quick pen­cil sketches of any­thing and every­thing, but also wrote about daily events and her feel­ings, thoughts, and dreams. She was eccen­tric and intro­spec­tive, so when she urged me to begin writ­ing in a diary each day, I complied.

And for sev­eral years, I recorded details about any­one and any­thing in my life. How­ever, I even­tu­ally became too busy and fell out of the habit and when I went away to col­lege, I left sev­eral vol­umes of jour­nals behind. I dis­tinctly recall the day I was home for a visit and my mother asked me to sort out some of my belong­ings so that she could make use of some shelf space. I was hor­ri­fied to real­ize that my jour­nals were still here in my par­ents’ house and won­dered if my mother had read any of the entries. Rather than take those diaries back to my apart­ment with me, I ripped them up and threw away the pieces (we did not have shred­ders in those days). At the time, I thought the detail I had recorded so dili­gently about my high school days and the cou­ple of years imme­di­ately fol­low­ing was pre­ten­tiously imma­ture and would hold no inter­est for me in the ensu­ing years.

Boy, was I wrong! Because if I had those diaries now and could refer back to them, I could prove to my friends that I never had a crush on our friend Steven. They insist that I did which would have been ridicu­lous because, even then, it was com­mon knowl­edge that I would never be his “type.” We were sim­ply very good friends and spent a lot of time together, so I think that our friends merely mis­in­ter­preted the para­me­ters of our relationship.

Increasingly-frequent “senior moments” pro­hibit me from remem­ber­ing many of the details about those 18-hour days spent attend­ing classes after which every evening and week­end was devoted to rehears­ing the lat­est production.

But a crush on one of my best friends? A core mem­ber of our pre­cious lit­tle gang? Surely I would remem­ber that, right?

If only I hadn’t destroyed those old journals …

Do you main­tain a diary? How long have you been writ­ing in a joun­ral? Have you ever destroyed an entire or por­tion of a diary? If so, why?

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On the Same Topic:

• Does Blog­ging Make You a Bet­ter Writer?
• When Did You Know You Were a Writer?
• Con­nected Lives (Part Six)
• Con­nected Lives (Part Five)
• Con­nected Lives (Part Four)