{"id":5803,"date":"2016-12-05T20:15:16","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T01:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5803"},"modified":"2016-12-12T21:02:07","modified_gmt":"2016-12-13T02:02:07","slug":"keeping-track","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5803","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Track"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"holidailies2016\"December 5, 2016
\nMonday<\/strong><\/p>\n

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. . . . Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.<\/em>
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u201d Joan Didion, b. 1934
\nAmerican novelist and essayist
\nfrom “On Keeping a Notebook”<\/p>\n

I have a friend who might be described as a typical modern professional woman: she’s mid-forties, has a demanding job as a criminal defense attorney, three children all in different schools, an ex-husband with whom she must coordinate schedules for the two older children, a husband with his own demanding schedule that must be considered when determining everyone else’s, and a mother in a nursing home an hour’s drive away. My friend is a reader and a thinker who has to know many things about many things to serve her family and her clients as well as to figure out her place in this world.<\/p>\n

She does not keep a journal. She does not write a narrative of her own life as it is happening.<\/p>\n

“How do you keep track of yourself?” I asked her once.<\/p>\n

“I remember,” she said.<\/p>\n

I’m told I have an unusual memory for details. I recently recalled for a friend the titles of two of the movies we saw on Friday afternoons at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School in 1959 (Glory<\/em>, with Walter Brennan, and The East Side of Heaven<\/em> with Bing Crosby). I know the first words I ever uttered to my husband (“You said my name wrong.” \u00e2\u20ac\u201d He’d made the blind date call and asked for Marge). I’ll never forget the time I insisted the mortgage papers be redrawn to include my name and not et uxor<\/em>, that is, “and wife of” the other person whose name was actually on the agreement but who had not provided any of the funds to secure it.<\/p>\n

And yet I keep a journal. I am currently in Volume 48 (about 150 pages each) of a personal journal kept steadily since 1992. I also have notebooks for writing ideas, for each of the long projects I have going ( two novels and a story collection), folders with fugitive information about places and people and random ideas. I am indeed a rearranger of things, an anxious malcontent fearful of loss and forgetting.<\/p>\n

From today’s early morning writing:<\/p>\n

December 5, 2016<\/em>
\nMonday<\/em><\/p>\n

8:15\/33\u00c2\u00b0 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I am concerned about how creaky I am. In <\/em>Light Upon Light [a book of reading for Advent], and excerpt from Silas Marner. Was that 9th grade or 10th?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At least I remember that it was assigned.<\/p>\n


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