Retiring a Family Journal

Recording Life's Tossed Salad

I’ve reached the end of my current family journal.  I started it in August, 2010 and finished it in February, 2011.  Its dog-eared pages are full of things I’ve jotted down, real ink on real paper, over the last several months.  Today, oh boy!, it’s time to bring out a nice, clean new one.  I love doing that.

Here’s a sampling of what I write in a family journal:

1.  Ideas for blog posts, essays and magnum opuses, 2.  Shopping lists, 3. Telephone numbers, 4. Word plays that entertain me, 5. Notes I take while doing family business (dealing with doctors, insurance, bills, mechanics, and so forth), 6. Insights on life and love and God, 7. Garden notes (seeds to order, garden planning schematics), 8. Rhymes and poetic phrases, 9. Smart alec thoughts that occur to me during meetings,  10.  An interesting epitaph copied from a tombstone, 11. Travel plans and itineraries, 12. Whatever else I want to jot down.

I don’t like segmenting life into pieces, forcing it into compartments.  Is Sunday the only God day?  Is work bigger than Monday through Friday and play bigger than the weekend?  Can I have a searing insight commuting on the bus or a creative, literary thought writing a routine memo at the office?  I celebrate the juxtapositions of life, the tossed salad that gets thrown into our bowls.  The whole mash of it is part of the adventure of living.  One way I enact that is by carrying the journal (open to the shopping list, of course) in the grocery while I shop, blending mundane shopping with the stirring literary, or else the mundane literary with stirring shopping.  I also like the sense of risk, carrying around and using a notebook that gets more precious as the entries mount over days, weeks, and months.  It helps me value a moment.  Also, moments of value are worth a risk.

I’ve been writing in a family journal for about three years now.  The great thing is that there are no rules.  I don’t have to write something every day though I can if I want to.  I could only write shopping lists.  I could record a brilliant idea for a novel or pen a Daily Sentence.  I could jot down an address or a reminder to do something.  I could write a word I hear and love like rondure.  I date each entry because I want to be able to remember the state of the salad on any particular day; remembering and reminiscence are part of the deal.

Life is a sloppy thing, lurching or soaring, sprinting or just sauntering along, and things and ideas and colors and sounds and tastes and smells and people and ups and downs get all mixed together throughout.  So I keep a notebook, a family journal, to record it all and keep me on track in the midst.