January 2007

Both Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra had award winning recordings of a song called Little Girl Blue.

It was a tender, compassionate string of lines feeling sorry for an old lady who had nothing left to do but: "Sit there, and count your fingers. What can you do? Old girl you're through. Sit there and count your little fingers, unlucky little girl blue."

The song truly never made sense to me but it did create an image - a negative image - and I harbored both that image and a fear that I could come to that, a modern day "Whistler's Mother." When I see that painting, “Arrangement in Grey and Black,” I don't see the mother of a talented artist, I see an old lady counting her fingers.

Then there's the image James Barrie created when he wrote: "An Old Lady Shows Her Medals." Mr. Barrie's fanciful imagination also brought us "Peter Pan," his tale about never growing up. The Old Lady he wrote about during World War One was a Scottish char-woman who did grow old, but was childless. Naturally all the women her age bragged about their hero sons - so she made one up. Interesting theater and another glimpse, perhaps, at how old ladies were once perceived.

We don't have them anymore. Oh, of course we have women well passed the four score years and ten, but they are not old ladies. I would say the only difference between then and now is to be found in attitude; attitude and self-perception. We bandy about expressions like 40 is the new 25; 75 is the new 50 and the age-old, age-defying, line "you're as old as you feel."

Nevertheless, and to say what is really on my mind, the clock and calendar still rule. You reach a time when you can not feel comfortable planning ahead if it's for more than 10 years regardless of the state of your health.

I think, what should I do about this? What should I do about that? Instead of an old lady in a rocker, I see my self as Rodin's "The Thinker." Today my dominent thought is that I’ll burn all my journals, and that’s a truly pressing thought. I always thought these notebooks of every size and color would be wonderful to have just to someday read over and over again. As I thumb through the pages now I see a laugh here and there, I see trials that seemed insurmountable and overwhelming situations that no longer exist. Nothing is as it was and a memory seems to be self-editing. I think our memories are programmed the same way childbirth is. Once you’ve moved on - once you’ve delivered the baby - the pain that brought you there is totally forgotten.

Escaping by writing a page or two is quite different from the idealistic "dear diary" entries of a teenager. The fears and concerns of a 16-year old are palpable on the pages but become nothing more than the right of passage we all recognize through hind sight.

As a grown woman, what is most evident on the written page is that I used my journals just to escape those difficult situations, just to be in communion with my own thoughts, just to share my sorrow, depression, feelings of inadequacy. I rarely ran to the blank pages to make note of the love, joy, happy times and delight found in all the years between then and now. I was too busy living those days and I remember them without having to nudge my memory.
But, and this is the burning question, do I have the right to remove the record? They are mine, of course, but they are also a first hand account of my life lived parallel to those I know and love. And times have changed. Where once my actions were admirable (driving my seven children around in a 1962 Chevy convertible rather than leaving any one of them home alone) are now greeted with "Were you crazy? You could have had an accident." I might stammer in my defense that "there were no seatbelt laws and they held onto each other...." but it looks terrible when you read it in the journal. And, that's only one example.

We all know that history will judge us but what about the fact that times change? What was prescribed by a doctor in the 1950s as a way to beat "housewife's fatigue" would be insanity today. He would suggest: "What you need to do is take time out in the afternoon, sit down, have a cup of coffee, light a cigarette. Relax. Forget about your problems." Most of my journal writing was when I was following the doctor's advice and pouring my heart out while I "relaxed" my problems away. Not one page reveals exactly who I was or whom I hoped to become. Not one page suggests by even an inkling just whom I am today, or where I am today, for that matter.

Between the ages of 30 and 60 I was in the child-bearing, child-rearing stage of my life. It was an actual historical era and I simply acted out my part upon that stage as a stay-at-home Mom. Books are written about how women played those scenes when ordinary childhood (Leave it to Beaver) became extinct and books on “How to Raise a Child” became trite compared to what we could see out our windows and often in our own homes. It’s all written down, recorded and filmed for posterity. But not by me.

No, I’m not an old lady by the old standards and, temporarily, at least, the journals can remain in the blanket box under the bed.

But the day is coming when I will fully understand this: Just because something was once treasured does not mean it can never be trashed.