Dear Diary

This is a story about a young girl and her diary. 

Think for a moment of the book - Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. 

I've read that famed memoir several times, seen a local theater production twice, and watched a Netflix documentary. All of them display Anne's elegant gift for writing. Her words act as portals to her confined, unsettled world at war. Her memoirist skills belie her youth.  

Now set those thoughts aside because this blog post is most definitely not about Anne Frank's diary. 

It is about a set of diaries that are at the other end of the memoir spectrum (if there is a spectrum.) 

It is about my pre-pubescent diaries.

During the height of the pandemic in an attic cleanout, I found the small colorful booklets written when I was 11-13 years old. I flipped through them briefly and chuckled at the rudimentary thoughts, facts, and often angst-filled events recorded in them. I promptly returned them to my memorabilia bin. 

In another more recent attic cleanout (does it ever end?) I came upon them again. And this time I read each entry. 

                My three diaries                    

                              

While they are inelegant, they are mirrors. The entries show lockstep recollections of what any day held, including terse facts about my family, friendships, school happenings, and trying to figure out boys (and some pop culture references randomly tossed in.)

For example, here is a sampling from 4 different days:

Woke up at 9:00 AM.

Joe (my brother) left for college.

We went to the shore.

I watched the Ed Sullivan Show.

As a lover of storytelling, it's clear that my intense need to write is tempered by little craft.  It is a sizable slice of humble pie. 

The entries double down on the mundane sounding more like a fact sheet than a memoir. I loved a solid declarative sentence. 

For example, these are actual full entries written at age 11:  

April 19 - Dear Diary, Going to Washington DC on the 22nd. Bye, Dee

April 20 - Dear Diary, Going to Washington DC. Bye, Dee 

April 21 - Dear Diary, Going to Washington DC. Bye, Dee

April 22 - Dear Diary, Went to Washington DC! FUN I bought writing paper and I slept on the train home.  Everything fascinated me.  Bye, Dee

We'll never know the specifics of those fascinating things. At least the verb use is noticeably fancy. Or should I say fascinating?

Other entries have a different focus. Boys, and, I use this next term loosely - "relationships" (such as they were in grade school) dominated my thoughts.  Who likes whom - who is talking to whom - who isn't talking to whom - who is walking home from school with whom.  

Did any homework ever get done?

Reading through the litany of likes and dislikes about girls and boys is relentless, especially in my 12-13-year-old diary. And each time (and there are many in the arbitrary world of pre-teen coupling) that I move from the liked to unliked column, I repeatedly write, "I don't care - it's better to be free!"  

How I wish I subscribed to that in my late teens and early twenties!

It is reassuring to see how powerfully important my friendships were.  That has been a constant thread in this girl's life. I still see three of these daily mentioned grade school pals frequently - Marianne, Pat, and Joan - and their impact fills me up in ways that my tween self couldn't see coming. I love this so very much.

Some use of sixties lingo makes me smile. Good things are Boss! and clever things are Cool or Groovy. Flower Power doodles were also very popular. I also had an affinity for using the Italian-American slang Agita (heartburn, acid) when things were upsetting though I consistently spelled it Ojida which naturally gives me agita reading it!

                        

                                        Flower Power                            Groovy!

Predictably, the start of each school year always brought even more agita. 

The 9/7/68 entry (below left) has an especially angsty tone. It's the eve of my first day of 6th grade and I am hyper-focused on Sister Alma, a teacher I do not want to have. Alas, the 9/8/68 entry(right) tells the sad tale 😊 (FYI - "Bleach" is an attempt at "Bleah" as used by the then very popular Peanuts character Linus)

                                                    

                  

Note: The "+" at the top of each page represents my catholic school education. Every paper we touched in school started not with writing our name but rather making the + at the top. The cross came first. The + infiltrated this early diary but the next two were +less. Maybe I was showing some independence? 

I write to Diary as though she is a person and this delights me. She's that secret keeper who holds no judgment and is always ready to listen.  She's the perfect confidant. This feels on point.

Report card ribbons, movie ticket stubs, and newspaper clippings about CYO sports add to the diary heft. An August 4, 1969 ticket stub (from the old Charles movie theater on Atlantic Ave. in Atlantic City, NJ) for the film "Funny Girl" doubles down on my teen love of Barbra Streisand. It would take me 37 more years before I would see her concert performance in Philly. Fan-girling Barbra has deep roots for me.

An odd keepsake is a Gino's french fries wrapper tucked inside the July 29,1969 entry. My brother Joe worked at that fast food place for a time in high school. Gino's burgers and fries were what my friends and I ate at my 13th birthday party. 

It was a big deal to me that we ordered food from Gino's! (Remember the jingle "Everybody goes to Gino's, 'cause Gino's is the place to go!) In an Italian household where every meal was homemade, saving the wrapper was my way of signaling the importance that Gino's food came to my house for my party! 

We always want what we don't have even if what we have is exquisite. Thanks to my Mom for indulging this newly minted teen and her friends. 

                                             

One of my favorite entries is a test drive of my signatures in June of 1967. In the month where the Vietnam War raged on, the Six-Day War in the Middle East ended, and the Beatles released the Sgt. Pepper album, my 11-year-old brain was set on figuring out what would be the best way to sign my nickname. 

Priorities.  

I often say I wish I could revisit the everyday pieces of my childhood by discerning them as a detached observer. To see, hear, and smell them at this stage in my life from a third-person point of view - as a sort of time-traveling witness - would be rich. 

Reading these diary entries begins to answer that wish and will have to suffice as a small window to what everyday life was like for me in the late '60s/early '70s. What they lack in powerful content, they deliver as a reminder of how dear and uncomplicated life was for this tween/teen girl. 

Dear Diary...thanks for the memories. Bye. Dee

Making Friends

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends...

At their popular peak, Lennon and McCartney wrote this song for their band mate, Ringo, to perform. It is, in and of itself, an act of friendship.

Before Yoko, before Linda, before Hamburg, Germany, before they hit the speed-of-light trajectory as The Beatles, they started out as teenage friends.  While the life changing fame the Liverpool lads experienced will elude most of us, we can relate to making friends in our youth.

Image:  http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

A recent NY Times article by Alex Willliams titled "Friends of a Certain Age" touched on a funny subject for adults - 'making friends.'  The phrase is so embedded in our childhood years that by the time we cross into our post education lives, we have learned to take it for granted.  Making friends is like breathing in your teens and twenties.

As teens, we fish in a veritable ocean of pal possibility. We surround ourselves with best friends, great friends and good friends.  It may be awkward, sometimes painful, and often unsuccessful, but the opportunity is always inches away in our travels: school hallways, sporting events, club activities, hanging out.

The nexus of Facebook is friends - requesting them, accepting them, unsubscribing (aka rejecting)  them.  And while Twitter users can 'follow' other users, some statistics show users most often follow their friends. 

So what happens in 'midlife?'

"As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends," says the Times article.                              http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html?pagewanted=all    

 I agree, in part.

Friendship in midlife becomes situational.  At work, we are thrown in with fellow employees with whom we share one thing - location.  Hopefully a friendship or two grows out of this, but it can be tricky.  Talking solely about work gets tedious, so you have to let go of what obviously brings you together and dig deeper.  It would be interesting to see how women and men shake out on mining for meaningful friendships at work.  My money is on women for taking the time.

My friend Heather and I met while working at the same company almost 20 years ago and continue to be friends.  We meet up and the conversation flows effortlessly.  It amazes and soothes me. 

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Becoming a parent lands us in our kids' worlds.  Finding pals at the same stage in life may not be hard but, again, it can be tricky. Your child is the launching point for the new friendship but going further to find out more about the person behind the parent takes sincere effort.  Parents swim in pools of common ground. However, talking about kids all the time is almost too simple and gets old.

I don't know if I would have written that when my daughters were very young.  I was so happy to have other parents to talk to about kids, school, activities, parenting.  Their support and humor have buoyed me.  What was essential before seems like an easy default now.  Too easy.  As my girls move on, I find myself titillated by talking less about motherhood and more about other topics.

 I could have kept a better balance but, I didn't.  Thankfully many of my "parent" friendships flourish like a long distance run rather than a sprint.


The Times article cites three ingredients sociologists have agreed (since the 1950s) are "crucial to making close friends: 1) proximity; 2) repeated, unplanned interactions; and 3) a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other."  Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro notes, "This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college."

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Was there anything better than late nights with college friends? No parents stepping in - the blissful freedom of it all!  I agree that college was the best time for making lifelong friends.  And yet, I don't keep in touch with any of them.   I had the same college roommate for four years - Kathy was as blond, blue-eyed as I am brown on both counts. She was funny, lighthearted, a guy magnet, joyful in every way.  I can only picture her laughing.  We would  always hold hands when having our picture taken. It confirmed our tight friendship.  She was a marvelous surprise!

Of course, Facebook has brought back some friends from long ago - it is comforting, fleeting, reasonable.  We send birthday greetings.  We connect at arms length. 

 Last week I saw country singer Mindy Smith perform at the intimate World Cafe in Philly.  Two guys sat next to me.  They were serious fans and hilarious audience members.  In between sets we laughed and talked like lifelong friends.   We skimmed the cream off the milk of friendship.

Those kinds of encounters are safe and reassuring.  I think they are the early bones of  friendship; people just plunked down together who seek common ground.

Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor and the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California is referenced in the Times article as a professional who "observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had."

"Basically," she suggests, "this is because people have an internal alarm clock that goes off at big life events, like turning 30. It reminds them that time horizons are shrinking, so it is a point to pull back on exploration and concentrate on the here and now."

Do we hunker down to only nurture our current friendships as we age?  I don't think so.  I think we become clearer about what fulfills us. If our current crop of friends meets that threshold then we'd be fools to let them pass.  But I feel equally excited about anticipating making new friends.  Numbers don't matter but I believe more friends are out there for me.

An old Girl Scout round resonates as I think about who we let into our lives and when - it's as true today as when I was 12 years old (and listening to the Beatles).  PS: I miss you Kathy!

Make new friends, but keep the old; One is silver and the other's gold.

A Facebook Birthday

The sentiments may be redundant, but c'mon, who doesn't love feeling the full burst of Facebook friend well wishes on their birthday?

Even with my paltry double digit number of Facebook friends, I become giddy as each wish appears. This year I was out of town for my birthday, so seeing those greetings come up on my smartphone while I was far away from home held sentimental sway for me. I am an easy target.

A piece in today's New York Times elaborates on the Facebook birthday and the comments that follow it reveal reader discontent that got my attention. Virginia Heffernan's Opinionator piece titled "The Social Economics of a Facebook Birthday" causes me to emerge from a birthday wish stupor to once again be reminded that every point has a counterpoint and catch myself saying, "Hmmmm..didn't consider that."
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/the-social-economics-of-a-facebook-birthday/?ref=opinion

Ms. Heffernan's article captures the efficiency of Facebook greetings and expands on the pluses and minuses. Yes, there are minuses. The disjointed Greek chorus of comments is in full voice and I find myself agreeing with some of the points made.

Part of the allure of reading articles on line is the collection of comments they consistently attract and the 120 comments as of this writing that follow the Times article did not disappoint.

Concern about personal information floating across the internet and in fear of identity theft were popular warnings from some readers. One reader stated that "Facebook is not social. It's financial." I argue it is both. Jennifer from New York referred to the networking site as "Fakebook" in her terse tirade.  I think she's had a less than good experience.

It was the remarks regarding friendship and how friends reach out that interested me the most. It seems to some that the FB posts represent a bare minimum outreach from folks on the perimeter of our lives, making the volume full but insincere. If someone knows its your birthday and purchases a card that resonates, writes a personal note, addresses it and remembers to mail it, the effort made outperforms some quick keystrokes and exclamation points. Yet, FB has a message feature that allows me to write a personal message to any friend which is just seen by them - this also shows sincere effort even if it is intangible. (The fact that the US postal service is planning to cut one third of its workforce, some 120,000 workers, by 2015 confirms the impact of the electronic message).

I am consistently hopeful that the mailbox at the end of my driveway will contain something personal each day that I collect the mail. I am disappointed 95 percent of the time (I repeat, an easy target am I), but on those few occasions when a note, a card, or, gasp- a letter sits among the hodgepodge of junk mail and bills my spirit lifts.  No amount of emails or FB posts can match that feeling for me. 

David Plotz, whose article from Slate was the basis for Ms. Heffernan's piece, spits lightening barbs as he tests the insincerity of FB birthday wishes calling FB "a form of social lubrication that makes a mockery of everyone connected to it."  He changed his birthday three times during July to see if anyone noticed and by far he received three days of good wishes with just a few 'friends' recognizing his greed. (His birthday is really in January). http://www.slate.com/id/2300637/pagenum/all/#p2   Mr. Poltz's FB account is a work page so his 'friends' are mostly Slate readers, not real friends.  I did appreciate his point and his methods of proving it even if he is a bit of a curmudgeon.

I am not a FB malcontent.  As we star to some degree in our little reality shows by posting on FB, it does raise the question of what purpose is really being served here?  Many comments sighed with a shrug wondering what harm was being done to receive a pleasant "Happy Birthday."  "It's nice. It's gracious. It's low-key and civil," noted one reader.  Why squeeze a negative out of a simple good wish?

I think the Mad Hatter had the most original approach as he and his friends greeted Alice in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" by wishing her a very merry Un-Birthday. It's different yet sincere. And no one gets hurt - well at least not until the Queen of Hearts shows up but that is for another day - certainly not a birthday! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InSn2BLDwfQ

Magnificent!

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." Robert Hughes

Say what?

I listened again as my co-worker and lunch companion, Gene, repeated this quote upon request.

Greater?  Less? Which one was it and, more importantly, how did it relate to my fears about a presentation which I mentioned in an offhanded way? This type of exchange long ago became the fodder of our brief hour together at a Glenside deli.  It was one of dozens we would spend digging around for the whys and wherefores, or as Gene would say it, the "puts and takes" of life's foibles.



Eugene P. Simonson

Fast forward 30 years and, once again, Gene reminds me of the above noted and long forgotten phrase.  He pitches this to me as I explain my newest fear of an uncertain career change.  Our conversation is rich and invigorating, as always.  Gene is like an infantryman when it comes to any dialogue - he comes prepared to dig in and face whatever verbal artillery is fired.  He is fueled by discussion and ably dispenses ideas, little known facts, and well thought out lessons with precision.  He is a fearless "go to" guy.

What makes this fairly recent conversation more poignant is the fact that Gene begins with a battering ram of personal news - he is fighting stomach cancer.  As he knowingly says with a hint of resignation, "You only get one stomach."  Our talk starts with his health and moves from the space of "what" to the deliciously exposed level of "why" and "how" we feel about things.  Gene just cannot help himself with his bottomless sense of wonder - it is the spark to our friendship that has burned for almost three decades.

On June 7, 2011 that spark extinguished in this world when Gene died.

I hate typing that weighted sentence.  Yet, I am gratefully buoyed by Gene's reply to his son Patrick's question, posed days before his death. Patrick, the eldest of five Simonson children, asked his dad for a word that best described his life of almost 79 years.  My friend, who consistently respected a well chosen word, replied, "Magnificent."

This one-word review is the perfect consolation prize for those of us who were lucky enough to be touched by the momentum of Gene's orbit.  We supped at the banquet of his ferocious appetite for life, even as life's menu held many unanswerable challenges. At the dessert course of his life, Gene's singular critique is a sweet niblet of comfort that resonates beyond measure. 

Gene equally loved life's flavor filled joys with its merciless disappointments because he respected and appreciated a challenge.  The more life stung, the more it motivated him to understand it or create alternatives to deal with a course correction.  He savored it all because he valued honest effort of any kind. 

Gene's enemies were ideas or actions that were not fully fleshed out.  He was confounded when people did not seek to correct a wrong or push to completion.  He struggled to understand why stumbling around in the dark is a sometimes temporary, but often regular, course of action for some of us.  Gene lived in the light because the dark held no purpose for his sensibilities.  I believe this luminous clarity is why people sought him out.  It sure is one reason why I was happily on the receiving end of his friendship.

 In her remarks of remembrance about her dad at the end of his funeral Mass, Gene's youngest child and only daughter, Eileen, shared her idea of why her father's time here ended - his curiosity got the best of him. It is the finest and most plausible explanation yet. Gene's curiosity was limitless.  Eileen's pinpoint observation brought it all into focus for us at St. Luke the Evangelist Church last Saturday.

And here's one more poignant fact that can be understood only as the universe operating as it should: Gene's wife of over 50 years is named Regina. Gene and Jean.  It is syncopation personified.

Jean will travel life using her singular metronome for now.  She is fully equipped for this challenge.  She and Patrick, Tom, Mark, Tim, and Eileen along with their respective families will carry this tempo set by the maestro over the course of their lives.  I am humbled by and grateful for their collective effort to keep playing the music that was the symphony of Gene's magnificent life.

The Little Ship

I stood watching as the little ship sailed out to sea. The setting sun tinted his white sails with a golden light, and as he disappeared from sight a voice at my side whispered,

“He is gone."

But the sea was a narrow one.
On the farther shore a little band of friends had gathered to watch and wait in happy expectation. Suddenly they caught sight of the tiny sail and, at the very moment when my companion had whispered, “He is gone” a glad shout went up in joyous welcome,

“Here he comes!”