1977 Redux: Part 1

These are my actual diaries and writings.  

I can tell you with absolute certainty that on Friday, March 18, 1977 I enzymed my contact lenses. I also know that I went to school that day, came home, did homework, spoke to my boyfriend.  Then I babysat my brother and sister while my parents went to the doctor. I wrote out thank you cards to guests of my Sweet Sixteen party two weeks prior.  I took a bath, got dressed and went to dinner with my boyfriend.  It was a lovely night, and so we walked home, holding hands.  Finally, I enzymed my contacts, recorded the day's happenings in my diary and went to sleep.

It is, in hindsight, quite astonishing that I recorded nearly every single day of my high school years in exactly this way, but it's true.   It's all there in the books pictured above: what I did, who I saw and sometimes, even what I felt and thought.  My moods are evident in the handwriting which is mostly neat and orderly but when upset, might be scrawl, almost illegible, and written into the margins when the space given was too quickly filled with words that couldn't contain my passion or anger.

I don't really know why I felt compelled to document these years, and many others in varying degrees later on.  I think the portrayal of John Boy Walton writing in his journal on television might have given me the initial idea.  But also I think the young girl had some inkling that her future self would find these writings to be a treasure one day.  And she was right about that.

In reading what took place in 1977 recently, I was struck by how many times the memory of a moment, or an hour, or a day, returned to me; often vivid, sometimes vague, but nearly always these memories had been lost to me until the written words on the page supplied the key to where they were locked in my memory.

Here's some of what I know about that year:  The summer was hot.  Son of Sam struck in our neighborhood, killed a girl and blinded her date.  There was a blackout for days in New York City.  I was sixteen years old.  I had girlfriends I loved.  I had a boyfriend I loved.  My boyfriend did not love my girlfriends; they kindly returned the favor.  We fought.  We laughed.  We loved.  We learned.  

Here's an example of what we were doing on Tuesday, July 19, 1977.  This is more or less what I wrote for that date:

Is called.  At 10:00 we (likely Is, Barb, Di, Carol P, Carole D., myself, maybe others, I don't recall) went to Manhattan Beach.  It was so hot and crowded that we left the beach at 2 pm.  It reached 102 degrees.  When we got home, we went into Carole's pool and had a ball.  Got home at 5, went out to dinner, then the girls (probably the same girls) came to my house, and we watched the movie Love Story on tv.

This is a typical day that hot summer.  I likely would not recall anything at all about this day if it had not been recorded in my journal. After reading this entry, I can recall most of what is written here and through these memories, reach other forgotten details about that particular day and others like it, details not written down, like how hot and uncomfortable it was on the bus-ride home when we were sunburned, thirsty and chafing with sand.   There is a kind of sensory memory, if that's even possible, that comes along with the primary memory, a flooding of knowledge about what it actually felt like to live that day.

This is what it was like in Brooklyn, NY in the summer of 1977.  Most of the buses were not air conditioned.  We stood on our feet most of the way home, beach bags between our legs or hanging from our sunburned shoulders. There were at least two different buses, or maybe one long ride, I'm not sure. But I am sure we were over-heated and dehydrated;  I recall feeling light-headed and faint on the bus-ride home that day.  We probably did not take food or water with us.  We were young; we didn't worry about those kind of things.  We probably had only enough cash with us to pay for the bus-ride home.  These are the thoughts and memories that return to me in a flood when I read the entry for this date.

I remember that Carole's pool was a cool oasis beckoning us home; we could not wait to get into that pool and feel the cool waters close in over our heads.  I can remember this as though it happened yesterday, not 37 years ago; the relief from the heat granted by that pool on that day so long ago.  I am in fact surprised I remember this as vividly as I do after all this time.

And oddly enough, I don't recall the rest of that day at all, though I know what I did because I recorded it.  I seem to have gone to New Corner's Restaurant for dinner and then - apparently we hadn't already had enough of each other at the beach and the pool -  the girls met again at my house that night to watch Love Story and when it was over, they walked each other home.

As I am writing this, I realize how very different my city childhood in the 60's and 70's is from what my kids experienced here in suburban New Jersey in the 90's but that is a blog entry for another day.

We were independent and free.  That is what I am reminded as I read about my experiences that year.  We went everywhere with mass transportation and there were no cell phones or texting for parental check-ins every hour.  Our parents survived, and thankfully, so did we.

In those days, we did everything in a group.  To be on the outs with one in the group, did not disqualify you from the friendship of the entire group.  We just worked it all out in the fullness of time.  I learned a lot about love and forgiveness from my girlfriends, having been on both sides of the loving and forgiving equation and it always meant a lot to me to be a member of that special group of girls.

I still feel that way.  Though I don't see them except through Facebook (which I am so very thankful for), I will always feel connected to the girls I grew up with.  I hope they also feel that way about me.  Nothing can ever replace those once-in-a-lifetime days we shared.  I am happy to have a record of those years in these diaries, a link to the past both immediate and poignant.  To read these is a bit like time-travelling with my younger self as guide.

So this is what I plan to do with these journals:  read, remember, and be truly grateful for the many wonderful days I have had in my life with people whose love and laughter are engraved in my heart forever.

I will have more to say about 1977 and other years in posts to come.