Return to the Pen

So apparently what’s happening now is that I am returning to journaling, but I’m mostly doing it old school – with pen, on paper, and for me.

I had been intrigued by my friend Rich Wilhelm’s talk about looking back at his old journals, and his commitment to write a little bit (217 words) each day on his blog just to get the words out there. That happened to coincide with my restarting therapy to try to deal with some lifelong unresolved grief, as well as <waves hand> … all this. To try to get the timelines straight on some early losses (because honestly: get enough years behind you and you will forget when things happened, even though you used to know it like it was engraved), I looked back at the journals I kept in high school, which I started specifically because at the end of ninth grade we found out that a friend, someone I had been friends with since kindergarten, had terminal brain cancer. We were schoolmates, playmates, we were Cub Scouts, Webelos and Boy Scouts together. We walked to school together in the mornings, and then back home and to school again at lunch time in junior high. And then all of a sudden, he was sick, and the prognosis was terminal. He made it almost another two years, though, into our junior year, and then . . . gone.

And in with that, there were others, what felt like a lot of others. A friends’ father, one of the best men I ever knew, who was nothing but generous to me and who knew how to laugh like no one I knew. A brother and sister, both friends of mine at some level and in my circles, killed by a drunk driver. Another great man I met through Explorers who served as a mentor to me and is probably the reason I got to go to college, just suddenly dead at 40. There were some other, more minor characters who died in that time as well. It all gave me a sense of impermanence that didn’t serve me well in the next several years. And as guidance and help with my grief, I was given nothing. You went to the funeral, paid your respects, and moved on, apparently as if those people never existed. It fucked me up.

But I really didn’t have all my dates straight, my memories lined up, so I went back to those journals for some details, and found those and more. Much more – so much that I had forgotten. I knew that I was going to cringe over teenage crushes and, much worse, my horrible alcoholic depression of my early 20s. Many of those passages, I remembered from earlier re-readings. But this time, I saw something else too. I saw relationships that I had forgotten existed, sometimes with people I can no longer even identify. I saw little bright spots, little pleasures that happened even in some really dark days. (I also saw facts about those dark days that I had completely put out of my head.) This time around, I found some joy in it all, and amazement at all the things I used to do, what I used to be. It’s all changed so much.

My friend Rich also has an interesting little business where he makes notebooks with covers from VHS tapes, CD boxes and, more commonly now, album covers. A couple of weeks ago he had one with a Best of Cream album cover (a version I don’t even own) that appealed to me, and with unlined paper, I decided that maybe this was the notebook that would bring me back to writing. Then I had to find a pen, and for my journals, there’s truly only one pen: a Pilot Razor Point. I had to order those, they don’t even have them in stores that I could find (felt tips have been nearly completely erased, though I did find a decent facsimile). They have best suited my hand for decades. (I also am getting my old Waterman fountain pen running again, though that’s trickier for journaling and requires more patience to write legibly with.)

And all of a sudden, I’m journaling again, as I have on and off (though mostly off) since I was 14 (even before, really, but those are lose). It’s a peaceful alternative to doomscrolling the internet in the morning to just sit with a cup of coffee and pour my thoughts out onto a sheet of paper, not necessarily for anyone else in the world to read but me. Meditative. Useful. And it’s the first time in many years now that I have tried to write by hand. I missed it.

I regret that I don’t have journals from the child-rearing years, because so much is lost in my memory that I wish I had been able to retain and look back on. Those were fabulous years, so much going on, but there just wasn’t time or ability to keep a private journal. This blog sorta supplanted the idea of a journal for a long time. Yes, it was public, but in its early days it served as some sort of chronicle of life with our kids, so it has some of the value of a memory vault. And I’ll keep it going from time to time. Weirdly, I know some people still read it.

So, some things will come up and be posted here. A lot of things will simply be written up in between the covers of The Best of Cream, and then who knows what will take its place.