~John Fitzsimmons, English
Write what you know…
~Mark Twain
I don’t always practice what I preach, especially when it comes to the simple, unaffected, and ordinary “journal entry.” Much of my reticence towards the casual journal entry is the public nature of posting our journal writing as blogs more or less “open” to the public. It is hard for me as a teacher of writing to post an entry I know is trivial, mundane, and perhaps of no interest to my readers—but that is precisely what I need to do if I am to model the full spectrum of the writing process. Keeping a journal is more than a search for lofty thoughts amidst the detritus of the day; it is a practice that keeps our wits and writing skills honed for a coming feast by rambling through the meat of the day and drifting and sailing to whatever port is nearest to my pen. Writing is always an odyssey, and so I have to let my mind go and journey (journal) where it will. Good words are built our of ordinary thoughts. At the very least, a journal, filled with the scraps and pieces of our daily lives, will outlive our own lives and serve as both beacon and reminder to future generations.
Once, in my days as a junkman, I cleaned out an old barn in Maynard after an elderly widower passed away—a man I only remember now as Bob. While sifting through boxes of Bob’s junk for anything of value, I came across a series of leather bound journals dating back to the 1930’s. A journal marked “1941” piqued my interest, so I looked up the date of the Pearl Harbor attack, eager for insight on any profound effect that day marked on the common person of his or her time. I turned through pages of impeccable script and learned how Bob and his family went to church in the morning, during which they sang certain hymns. Afterwards, they drove to Stow for dinner with his extended family. He wrote about the meal, the weather, the condition of the roads, and, in two brief lines at the close of his entry: “The Japs attacked Pearl Harbor today. I trust President Roosevelt will know what to do.” And that was it.
At first glance, I saw a xenophobic racist putting blind trust in infallible rulers. I couldn’t reconcile it with the kind and gentle old man, and best friend to my best friend’s father, who had recently passed away. I didn’t see it as a window into another time and another mindset. In the arrogance of my youthful pride, I couldn’t appreciate the elegiac beauty of his day—a whole day devoted to faith and the full circle of family. It wasn’t until years later when I sat on the bench by the World War Two Memorial in downtown Maynard and scrolled through the scores of boys and men from this one small mill town killed in battle that I realized the full extent of my myopia. I should have sat in his barn for days and read every word from his journals and then, maybe, I could have seen the evolution of a person through the fullness of time, through the clarity of still waters.
Maybe Bob’s youthful ramblings, tempered by the death of so many of his townsmen, could have somehow transformed into the pearls of laconic wisdom old age should bring—pearls that would fetch a heady price in the market of the modern mind. The greatest tragedy is we’ll never know. I offered the journals to his son, but he had no interest. He paid me fifty dollars for the load, which I scattered into the fires of the Concord dump. The irony of tossing away those journals not more than 150 yards from the site of Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond remained lost on me for many years, even as I dutifully trudged to the Concord library to scour through the tomes of Thoreau’s own journals. Bob practiced exactly what Thoreau believed was required first of any man or woman when he admonished all would be writers:
I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives.
~Henry David Thoreau, Walden
A further irony is my own journals bridging my years between eighteen and twenty five years old were inadvertently tossed into the same dump by a roommate intent on purging all the junk accumulating in our Williams Road farmhouse. The Concord dump is now a series of perfectly sculptured hills slowly regaining the shape and character of the woods Thoreau tramped and stumbled through 150 years ago. It is a noble idea funded by the well-intentioned, but a nobler action would be to dig through the mold and dirt and trash of time to truly find what the past has to offer us, buried, almost irretrievably, as it is.
Poetry is what is left unsaid. The stolid words of brevity simply point us in a direction only the brave will wander, but through the daily words of an old Italian farmer, I found a new kind of poetry. Pine Tree farm, butted against the rail line on the far side of Walden, and owned by the Ammendolia’s, was one of the last of the Italian family farms once scattered in every corner of Concord. Tony Ammendolia was the patriarch who somehow kept the dream alive, even as farm after farm succumbed to the teeming aorta of suburbia. It was there where I worked on school breaks and on summer weekends, picking corn at 4:00 AM before the heat of the day, hoeing seemingly infinite rows of tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, and eggplants in the long, hot afternoons where success and failure crisscrossed and intersected in a struggle to just get by.
My Goddaughters were raised there, and their parents, my good friends Deb and Jack, still keep a few acres going to this day. Tony died two years ago after defying for many years the cancer he fought with the same stubbornness he did the vicissitudes of nature in the cycle of droughts and floods and insects he faced at every turn during his days as a farmer.
Every night for over sixty years, Tony would sit at his desk after dinner and write in his journal. Tony knew I was a writer and would kiddingly boast he was a writer too, but in a good-natured poke at my transient approach to life, he was also a farmer. I was at Jack and Deb’s recently for dinner, and I asked about Tony’s journals. Jack perked up as the proud inheritor of this family treasure and immediately found me one of the many small notebooks Tony kept. I opened it and felt the tears well in my eyes, for it read like a type of poetry I had never read before.
Tony never meandered from the scope of his own life, but his words spelled out a conviction celebrating the common fragility and majesty of life with sentences sparse and foreboding: “Potato beetles got the eggplants on Bedford Street. We will not sell eggplant this year.” “Three days of rain. Lucky, as the irrigation pump needs a new valve,” each entry a sublime excising out of the ordinary: the sky, the temperature, what was done, what had to be left undone, how much seed, what was selling and what was not selling—but never a mention of the money made or not made. There is never a mention of personal angst or frustration for over sixty continuous years. Those details were best left to imagination and speculation. Some, myself especially, have to call it poetry.
Our own journals need the same attention Bob and Tony put into their daily records. Our journals must also chart the common unfolding of our lives. As writers and sojourners in life, it is our call and duty to map the expanse of our existence. We don’t need to lay our souls bare for all to see and gossip about, but we should find a time and place to keep a daily journal. Just a few short lines each day will serve to spark your memory in a later age—and memories wizened in the vat of a thoughtful life will always produce a finer wine. Journaling is a word antiquated before its time. Though fewer and fewer of us take the time to sit with pen and paper, there is still a time and a place for the spirit of journaling to continue.
Make the time to map your own quest, for the paths we trod are soon lost to memory and space, and we lose our connection to the original experience. A friend asked me yesterday why I didn’t have a GPS in my truck, to which I offered, “First, I have to remember where I’ve been.” I wish I had more strength to follow up these words. Bob and Tony’s journals are permeated with an almost religious devotion as they chronicle the recitations of their days in rhythm with the pattern of their everyday lives.
One could argue we use social media as a way to chronicle our days. We are literally recording and presenting our lives to the world, but there does not seem to be a sacred and solitary pattern anyone could call journaling. Too often, our posts on social media chronicle a tiresome and sycophantic obsession with random, mundane and profligate interests and lifestyles. It is hard—and sometimes impossible—to wrest context out of the content.
Nothing, except a prurient curiosity, keeps me interested—which is no road to enlightenment for either side of the equation. Sometimes there are links to blogs and other artistic websites where a deeper and more invested side of that person comes through. For most of us, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and whatever else is simply an adjunct to life—a social gathering place to rest and draw water with friends and community. There is nothing wrong with this, but it should never be the destination of a true journey, and if you can’t see life as a journey—an odyssey of existence—you simply can’t see.
I guess the word I am looking for is devotion. None of our lives are more complicated than the lives of Bob or Tony. The difference is in how they each created time everyday to look closely at what was important in the daily unfolding of their respective lives.
Bob and Tony never looked for a response, a like or a link. They simply remembered.
Take the time. Make a wise choice.
Remember where you’ve been.
