44 Years in a Shoebox

in a shoe box

Do you remember where you were last year on this date? Do you remember what you did that day? Did you go to work? Did you travel somewhere? Were you sick? Did you go out that night, or did you stay home and watch TV?

Well, like most people, you probably remember where you were, but don’t have a clue about the rest of it. Unless that day was a holiday or your birthday or some other momentous occasion there is just no way to distinguish that date from all the other days.

I don’t mean to brag, but I can tell you exactly where I was and what I did a year ago today. Or fi ve years ago for that matter. Or 10 years, or even 40 years ago. Pick a day. Any day. I’ll tell you where I was, what I had for breakfast, where I went, who I was with, and what I did all day long. I’ll tell you what the weather was like if it was dramatic, and what I did that evening and what time I went to bed.

No, I do not have an eidetic or photographic memory. I have a shoe box. I have a shoe box with 44 diaries inside.

Whoa. You may wonder how in the world I got 44 diaries to fi t inside one shoe box. You might surmise I either have extremely large feet, or that my diaries are very small. The second guess would be the better one. Most of my 44 diaries measure a mere four inches high, two and a half inches wide, and three-eighths of an inch thick. By carefully placing them cover to cover, in two long parallel rows along the bottom, and by then stacking the remaining diaries fl at above them, it is indeed possible to get all 44 diaries inside one shoe box with room to spare. If you were to randomly open one of these small one-year diaries you would fi nd that the two pages displayed would show one week. You would fi nd small printing from a fi ne-point mechanical pencil fi lling the fi ve lined spaces allotted for each day. These small notations would be short phrases separated from each other by a slash. Activities would be cited, along with the times, places and names of people. What I ate or drank is noted. To save space there would be numerous abbreviations. You would fi nd odd symbols like an asterisk or a square or a circle or an X. Each symbol, of course, would have its own meaning. In this way I am able to record almost everything I did on any particular day in less than two square inches of space.

You might be asking yourself why anyone would want to do such a thing. I mean like, “Who the hell cares what you did all day?” Right?

I’ve given a lot of thought to this question lately as I sit here contemplating the shoe box containing a detailed record of my life for almost half a century. It wasn’t an easy task to accomplish, you know. What value does it have after all? And, yes, who really cares? Well, I’ve come up with some answers for you and me. But fi rst, let’s talk a little more about the diary.

I usually write in my diary at the end of the day when I’m lying in my bed before going to sleep. I fi nd it’s easier to remember what I did then, rather than waiting till morning. In the morning I will have undoubtedly forgotten a few things. I am also more likely to be thinking ahead and in a hurry to be up and about and embarked on the new day. It usually takes me from fi ve to seven minutes to record what I did on any given day. I estimate I spend about 40 minutes a week writing in my diary. That translates into about two hours and 40 minutes a month, or roughly 32 hours a year. Think about that. That’s the equivalent of working at it for four eight-hour days. Multiply four eight-hour days times 44 years, and what do you get? 176 eight-hour days. We’re talking the equivalent of working eight-hour days every day for almost six months. That’s a half of a year of my life!

“Why the hell bother?” you continue to wonder, somewhat ingenuously. Don’t worry, we’ll come to that. I was 30 years old when I began keeping a diary. I don’t remember exactly why. Most likely it was because I thought I had had a fairly interesting life up until that point and regretted not having a record of it. At the daunting age of 30 I bemoaned the fact that my youth was a thing of the past. I remember thinking of myself as over the hill, as an old man. Ha. And I regretted not having some record of those tumultuous years of my often misspent youth. In rare sentimental moments I wanted to relive some of them. But of course I knew I couldn’t. I could never go back and recapture those days for I could only remember a fraction of them. I had forgotten much more than I could ever possibly remember. Sound familiar?

I decided the only thing I could do now was to go forward. I perhaps suspected I might still have an interesting life in the years to come. Maybe I wanted to start a diary at 30 so that as a truly old man I would be able to look back and

get a clearer picture of what I was up to in those years. It would be amusing perhaps, and hopefully not too sad.

I began writing my diary in January of 1976. From that humble beginning I have faithfully recounted the daily events of my life up until now in the year 2021. I had moved frequently over those years, worked at di erent professions, lived in various parts of the country and overseas, and did a good deal of traveling. I guess you could say I lived a life of studied carelessness. But no matter where I was living at the end of each year I always bought a new diary for the upcoming year. I bought them at stationery stores or online, trying to purchase the same size and brand, but one with a di erent colored cover from the previous year. Those of you who are mathematically inclined may have already cranked the numbers and detected an apparent error. If it is true I began keeping my diaries in 1976, and that it is now 2021, the number of diaries I claim to have is incorrect. There should be 45 diaries, not 44. “Why is that?” you might ask. Well, I’m red-faced to report that one diary is indeed missing -- the diary for 1998, one of my most varied and unusual diaries. That was the year my wife and I were living in Berlin, Germany. She was there on a one year contract with an international hotel company. We had numerous adventures while living in Berlin. We met interesting people, made dear friends, and did a fair amount of traveling around Europe in 1998. It was on one of these trips that I lost my diary. On an evening in late November of that year we had just arrived at the main train station in Florence, Italy. We had come after spending three days on the coast, at Cinque Terre. We were inside the terminal standing before the large, brightly lit schedule, looking for the next train to Rome. My diary was in my fl ight bag sitting atop the suitcase on wheels which stood next to and a little behind me. While gazing up at the train schedule, I was professionally relieved of the fl ight bag by a young, talented and nimble-fi ngered thief. I sensed it almost immediately and turned towards the agile crook as he headed for the door. I started to chase after him, but was then surprised when an apparent accomplice (an older man) “accidentally” crossed in front of me. We collided. Somehow we became entangled and by the time I extricated myself and reached the door, the young bandito had disappeared into the darkness.

The heist had been admirably consummated, a veritable work of art worthy of Michelangelo and Da Vinci. Gone was my fl ight bag which I’m sure they hoped contained great riches. Alas, it only contained two bottles of wine, my dirty laundry, my toiletries, and my diary. Luckily, no money, no passport, no tickets. But my little book with eleven months of entries for 1998 had been sucked into the shady Florentine underworld, never to be seen again. Back in January 1976, when I fi rst began keeping a diary, I had just returned from a two year stint in America’s own version of the French Foreign Legion — the Peace Corps. I was stationed out in the middle of the Pacifi c Ocean, in the remote islands of Western Samoa. While living in that fabled South Sea paradise I kept a journal of sorts, noting from time to time my observations on the Samoans and their culture, describing my own small adventures, recounting my romances, and outlining my work as a teacher of island youths. I also gave vent to my loneliness and bemoaned the relentless boredom. I discovered that it is not as easy living on a tropical island as I had once imagined. After six months I had done just about everything it is possible to do on an island out in the middle of nowhere. For every rare highlight there were days and weeks of boring sameness and tedium. But that’s another story. The point being: keeping a journal is di erent from keeping a diary. A journal is like a novel whereas a diary is more like a short story. A journal gives you plenty of room to wander and describe and ruminate at your leisure. In my mind, a diary is far more utilitarian. A diary is a place for a more concise recording of daily events without all the fl owers and thistles of interpretation. It is something like a ship’s log.

So back to the question of what is the value in keeping a diary? Well, I have learned a few things by keeping one over the decades. For one thing, I discovered that when I read an entry from long ago I fi nd the merest outline of a day can spark all sorts of memories. It puts me there in that time and place, and causes me to see and remember much more about that day than is actually written. And by looking back and forward from that entry I can really get a sense of where my head was back then.

When I browse my old diaries I sometimes feel that I know more about what was really going on in my life than I did when I was actually living it. In some cases I can clearly see the disasters and the successes coming before they occurred. Keeping a diary for an extended period of time helps me remember and learn from the past. It keeps me honest. Its contents are deeply personal.

Which begs the question — When I cease to exist, of what possible use could my diaries be to anyone else?

Answer: Sometime in the distant future they may well be of interest to people of an academic persuasion, including cultural anthropologists. After all, the diaries cover a long time-period; they have variety; and they contain a host of detail. If my diaries survive me, and were digitized, they could be studied as raw data. Patterns would emerge, conclusions could be drawn, stories could be told. They would stand as a record of one person’s life before the backdrop of a particularly dynamic period in human history.