Prompt #6 - Diaries and Journals

 

Prompt #6 - Diaries and Journals

 

I do not keep a diary or a journal. The closest thing for me is my TO DO List which I keep, monthly, with daily updates, which includes work, home, and social records. At the end of each month I run it off (keep it as a WordDoc) and store it with my business accounts. Not terribly romantic or revealing. Maybe revealing in the sense that I think of my work seriously, as a business. That's partly why I tend not to journal. I feel it is a way of evading work, or of putting my energy and inspiration elsewhere, taking away from work. I think of journalling as therapy, and I think of writing as something that is not really done, finished, until after it has been re-written, revised, polished. Which does not seem possible with a diary or a journal. I guess you could write "I should have said". Do people keep diaries on computers? Because, for at least twenty years, I have done all my writing at a keyboard, and before that for another twenty, on a typewriter. My handwriting has deteriorated from lack of practice. I am curious to learn how others make this balance between private and public writing. I do make profuse notes on scraps of paper which I refer to for writing ideas and prompts. Periodically, I sort through these scraps piled around my desk and file them in the appropriate file folder.

I have a diary I started when I was nine, and trip diaries I have started and mostly not finished, and a couple of work diaries, again usually petering out after about two weeks. I tend to avoid looking at these documents. Avoidance is my default position.

I have inherited one red scribbler which my mother used as a diary for one year. I do not know what prompted her to do this. It was very unlike her. I suspect it may have been suggested by someone else as a way for her to cope as it seems to cover about one year after her father's sudden death when she was almost twelve. It talks about school, work, sports, money she made cleaning homes and the school, visitors to their ranch home, trips taken. The most exciting page is the day she met my father, a new hired man, working on the ranch owned by friends of the family. She describes the day (and later told about things too risque to write down) when she was twelve/thirteen and he was eighteen and a group of teens went to the old swimming hole. They were never an item then. He may have dated one of her older sisters. They did not get together until ten years later, after the war.

I take a lot of photographs. I have a cupboard full of shoe boxes of photos filed by place or family grouping. Since I got my first digital camera at least five years ago I have taken more than 10000 photos which are on my hard drive filed by date (making it very difficult to access a specific shot). I also have all my mothers' old photo albums, a trunk full. My passion is flowers, followed by greens, then landscapes. I don't have any photos of myself that I like but I have taken several snapshot portraits of friends which I treasure. I don't even want to think about what will happen to my photos as I have no descendants. And doesn't it seem to be a truism: we all get "into" genealogy after it is too late to interview the people we really needed to talk to?