The Half-life of a Buried Past

The term “half life” means the period of time it takes for the amount of a decaying substance to decrease by half. Often used to describe toxicity or radioactivity, half-life doesn’t mean that all the toxic particles in a contaminated deposit are half as toxic as before – it’s that enough have degraded to halve the toxicity of the entire mass. Some atoms may now be inert, harmless. But others pulse just as deadly as ever.

This is how I think of a shabby cardboard box that now sits in my basement, after its contents spent the last 23 years hidden away.  Inside is a jumble of spiral notebooks, composition books and artist's sketch books, filled with handwriting. My personal journals, from 1966 to 1982 or thereabouts.

I’ve always wanted to write. I still remember a “book” I wrote and illustrated at about seven, about a fluffy yellow duck. I’d received diaries as gifts, leather books with clever little locks on the covers – but diary-writing never caught on. Then at ten, I read “Harriet the Spy.” Writing in a book with printed dates wasn't any fun, but a notebook like Harriet’s where I could write all I wanted? That was more like it.

At first my journals were small spiral notebooks, filled with my round looping print, often in pink or purple colors. I still remember the pens, actually – bright stubby ball-points in vivid colors, or Flair markers. I remember what a discerning shopper I was at that age, how much care and effort I took at the stationery store.

By high school, I was using lined composition books – the kind with the ink-blot pattern cover. These lasted into college, but by that time, my handwriting had changed dramatically. I used the finest of penpoints – the Rapidograph technical pen, with a 00 nib and ink you had to fill yourself. In the journal the writing is so small I actually wrote two lines between printed rulings, doubling the page length. Why did I do it? Secrecy? But what amazing discipline, and for how long!

In college I carried huge floppy messenger-bags to fit my journals. When I moved to New York City to work in the theatre, I changed to a smaller black-bound unlined artist’s sketch book. I bought them at Pearl Paint on Canal Street.

I carried my journal everywhere, and wrote constantly. I wrote sitting in bars, on the subway, at work, when I was drunk. I wrote when I was love-lorn. I wrote about sex. I wrote about feeling doubt and conflict. I wrote nasty things about others, and I wrote about people I longed for. I wrote about things that shame me now.

Most of my personal things remained in my family’s home when I moved to Seattle – I could only ship a few boxes.  I brought my most recent journals with me, but my childhood journals stayed at Mom and Dad’s, stored in a large wicker hamper. I fancied they were hidden safely, and it's probably true. When my parents sold our home in New Jersey to move to Texas, the hamper went, too, like every other piece of furniture in the house, with its contents intact.

Each time I’d visit Mom would remind me of childhood possessions to claim, but I let the journals stay untouched. After Dad died, and Mom eventually left Texas, I shipped my journals to myself in Los Angeles.

I have a very peculiar feeling about the journals. I can’t read them. They are radioactive. The few times I’ve glanced at a page, I'm shamed by the self I was.  When my son went to college in Manhattan, I peeked inside, to remember the city-scape he would soon experience. And after reading Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” – I paged through to remember my life in parallel time. Compared to Patti and Robert Maplethorpe's lives, my adventures seemed relatively healthy.

But the journals from when I was 13, 14, or 15? I am not strong enough for that. Believe me, the accounts of living in SoHo squats with cocaine-fueled punk-rockers and drag queens shame me far less than the craven, needy, bitter school girl I was at 14. I need a full safety suit and lead gloves to do more than crack the front cover and look at the date on the first page.

I don’t want my family to read them, either – not my husband nor my son.  God help me, after 27 years of marriage and motherhood, I’m still afraid of being exposed as a fraud and monster.

Yet the journals were such an integral part of my life I can’t throw them away.  So there they are in the basement. Sometimes at night, I feel their isotopes glow beneath the floorboards of my bedroom.

I recently read the book “The Red Leather Diary” by Lily Koppel. In it, the author tells of finding an old steamer trunk stored in the basement of an Upper West Side apartment building. In the trunk she finds the diary of an upper-middle-class Jewish girl, dated 1929 to 1934. She reads the diary and seeks out the author. Amazingly, she finds her, alive at 90.

The diary recounts its author’s budding sexual adventures and, frequently, shows her self-centeredness and vanity. Yet when the book is returned, the author embraces her young self. A widow now, she joins Koppel on book tours and interviews, and says “it has brought back some of the passion of my youth and made me feel more alive than I have in years.”

I don’t know what stopped my journaling. In 1979 I left New York and worked for Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. You would think that I would find even more compelling reason to journal. But, oddly, that was when I stopped.

It coincided with a change in my life; an affirming and positive love affair, professional success, a change of venue. I never really got back into the habit. Why? Because suddenly I wasn’t miserable anymore? Because I didn’t need to pour my heart out on the pages of a book anymore?

My garden journal, from 1995

When I began gardening, I started a journal again. I wrote to mark the seasons, the progress of growth, to compare plants from year to year. But there is no room for emotional angst in a Garden Journal, except for rage against hungry slugs.

But here I am.  The story of “The Red Leather Diary” has reminded me of the box in the basement.  What to do with them? Keep them? Burn them or throw them out? Heck, should I actually read them?  How about transcribe them and purge the embarrassing parts? What use would they be, as an historical artifact, a life-chronicle of a '70s era suburban middle-class schoolgirl turned East Village bohemian? Should I donate them to a library or university – or is that self-aggrandizement? Should I put them in a safe deposit box with instructions not to be opened until after my death? Instruct my heirs to change all the names?

What would you do?

This post was originally published at Jen on the Edge, on October 27, 2011, and has been slightly edited here with updates. Despite my hope it would escape his eye, my husband read it there, so I figured why not publish it here now?