Journal leaves little room for other 'stuff' (7/21/03)

A couple of years ago my daughter gave me a book for Christmas. It was one of those that are supposed to contain memories of days gone by. There is a page for every day of the year. Each page has a single question. Some of the queries are simple such as, “What is your mother’s full maiden name?” Others are a bit more complicated, such as the page I am stuck on right now.

It asks, “What is the best birthday present you have ever received?” The problem is that I can’t think of any birthday presents I have received over the years. I know I got them, I just can’t think what they were.

The thing about books of preprinted generic questions is that they seldom have room for the important stuff. I have yet to find a page where I can write about my grandmother and her sisters washing diapers. They were scrubbing the diapers on a washboard. Her sister was called away for a minute so my grandmother chose an especially dirty diaper and folded it up just right on the temporarily unused washboard. When her sister came back and pushed down on the dirty diaper the mess covered her arms from wrist to elbow! My grandmother never said how her sister retaliated.

There are no pages where I can describe what it was like to come home to see the wash hanging out on the line and feel the fear and dread welling up inside me because I knew that if there was laundry on the clothesline, there was fighting inside the house.

There is no place to put in writing what it was like to pick armloads of daffodils in the spring or the fun of snowball fights with the blossoms of the snowball bush. Where do I relate how my grandfather would take me out on starry nights and describe the constellations? Too bad I was so blind that all the lights in the sky ran together and now it is all I can do to pick out the Big and Little Dippers.

Where is the page where I can relate how my cousin and I were playing cowboys and Indians with corncobs? We started out using our fingers as guns, then progressed to cap guns then to corncobs because we each claimed the other missed and therefore refused to lie down and die. The red marks left when we pelted each other gave proof of a “hit.” Things got even more violent when the little brat tied me to a tree then walked off and left me.

By the time I got loose I was furious. I found him, tackled him, drug him back to the tree and tied him up. Guess which one of us got in trouble for that!

The book claims to be a record of times gone by. Where are the pages for home remedies? Sassafras tea for upset tummies and old rags rubbed on a wart and buried under the sweetpeas have no place in this book. Instead, it wants to know funny nicknames of people in town. Funny nicknames? Who cares about that? Where is a page for illnesses that run in our family? That is much more important than funny nicknames.

I keep plodding through the book, a few pages at a time. I am well aware that someday I will have to write a tale of my own for her. It will contain as much medical history as I can recall, and more importantly, it will show both sides of our family. It will show the ugly, violent side and also the funny humorous side. Maybe then she will know that she comes from a line of highly intelligent, extremely funny survivors.[[In-content Ad]]