Old Journals

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Since I’m planning to move in a few months, I’ve been going through my papers, throwing out half or more: I reduced a four double-drawer file cabinet down to four plastic boxes, and what I kept from a suitcase full of old correspondence fit inside two manilla envelopes. When I pulled another box out of the closet and saw dozens of spiral-bound notebooks, I groaned. These were my journals; I couldn’t toss them without first going through them for gems I might want to save. The letter-reading had already been torture–I wasn’t looking forward to this task.

But my old journals turned out to be a lot more interesting than the letters; for one thing, they were all written by me, rather than by others, and I find myself endlessly fascinating. I always expected that one day, in my old age, I’d read the journals–well, I’m not exactly in old age yet, but I am old enough to look back and see how terribly young I was.

For instance: In 1979, the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania blew. Nearly had a meltdown. Or something like that. At the time, my friends and I, all anti-nuke activists, were certain that our predictions of a nuclear holocaust were being realized. We thought the winds blowing east from Pennsylvania would make New York uninhabitable. At the time it seemed perfectly logical. I wrote:

There’s an anti-nuke demonstration up in Albany tomorrow, but Joani won’t go because she’s preparing to move, either to Illinois or Switzerland.

I mean, I just about cracked up. Joani, by the way, is still safe and sound in New York; I e-mailed her that passage.

I also wrote an almost epic poem about the event, titled “Even this.” Here I’d managed to eke out an existence, living communally with my kids and three other adults in a falling-down three-story house whose well was so contaminated we had to haul in bottles of water. And now, I wrote, we’d have to leave “even this.” When I delivered the poem to the office of the Woodstock Times, the newspaper’s eccentric, smart-ass editor (a few years later I would become his assistant) took it from my hand and, without reading it, called out to the typesetter, “We have another Three Mile Island poem here.”

I used to worry that when I die my journals will be discovered and, thinking they’re “a writer’s diary,” people will eagerly go through them with visions of publication, only to find nothing but badly written whining complaints. But I’ve been surprised to find them full of all sorts of sociological tidbits. Still, there’s a lot of whining going on, and I really do shudder to think about them being read when I’m gone–or even before that, come to think of it. Thus, I’m shredding. By hand, since I don’t have a fancy machine. The pieces will go into a plastic bag and into the garbage–recycling is too risky.

But if I come across anything else as interesting as the Three Mile Island fiasco, I’ll post it on this blog. Certain things, after all, ought to be saved for posterity.

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