My first diary was a tiny book with a smooth pink leatherette cover that sprang back like a cushion when you touched it. Of all my tenth birthday gifts, it was the one I cherished the most. It had a metal tab that locked and I kept the key on a string around my neck.
Each night, ritualistically swaddled in a chenille bedspread, with two pillows behind my back, I would print the day, month and year at the top of a fresh page followed by the news of the day.
Sam the hamster eskaped when we were cleaning the cage ... Today we went to the track meet and I tripped in the 100 yard dash.
The pages of the diary were very small, so I soon learned to be very concise.
Rained. Went downtown with Mum.
I was a diligent diarist for the first while. Then my entries became more sporadic, until finally, with complete disrespect, I cheapened the last pages by taping them full of bird cards from cereal boxes.
Another diary didn't cross my pen until I was thirteen and happened to notice a paperback book in a rack at the corner drugstore. It was the diary of Anne Frank and, for thirty-five cents, the jacket blurb promised me an intense literary experience. Anne's insights did affect me deeply and a diary once more became a secret and wonderful thing. Scrounging around the house, I found an empty red lab notebook from my father's university days to use, and, exchanging the comfort of chenille and pillows for the austerity of a straight-backed wooden chair and arborite desk, and began what I called my first "real diary."
The entries were made with precision and earnestness, in black fountain-pen ink.
Dear Kitty (I had no pride and used the name of Anne's confidante shamelessly) - I came across a copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in the bookstore and immediately bought it. It's a book I've heard a lot about and am dying to read - cover to cover, not just certain parts!
Hardly a gem of precocious wisdom, but paucity of material didn't stifle me and I perserved for a year. At the end of that year, a quick reading told me that I had missed the mark. My diary lacked universality; it would never be a best-seller.
For several years after that I was without a diary. Then, after university, as I prepared for the traditional European hiatus of single North American, the idea returned - in disguise. You couldn't go allthat distance without keeping some kind of record. But it wouldn't be a diary. It would be a journal - yes, a travel journal. This time I chose a practical black notebook with a coil binding.
Over the next three months i wrote whenever the notion hit - in dank train stations in England, in sombre youth hostels in Austria, in sunny outdoor cafes in France. The black notebook travelled through Europe and North Africa with me and back home again, where it remained, at the bottom of my backpack for six months.
One night, in a nostalgic moment, I dug it out and started reading. To my surprise, it held my interest for a good half-hour. There were a few inchoate passages composed in an alcoholic haze, but the rest reminded me of people and places worth remembering. Five people driving from Amsterdam to Venice sandwiched together in a Volkswagon beetle, the electric yo-yo salesman in Ibiza, Spain, the East German farmer trundling a wheelbarrow from East to West under the noses of high-tower armed sentinels.
At last, after two false start, I had succeeded at the diary/journal business. Or were the others false starts? Maybe my expectations were too high.
In any event, since then I write to myself at least once a week. These journals have spilled from notebook to notebook over the years. I keep them all close at hand, in a deep desk drawer. And the little pink diary that started it all is still around too, at the bottom of a cardboard box in the basement, separated long ago from its key.
"A diary is a good thing to have," an envious freckle-faced girl at the tenth birthday party had told me, running her palm over the smooth pink cover. "You're in trouble though if you lose the key."
She was wrong about the key, but right about the diary.
