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
