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.

The Sound of Silence

A fun fact, as my son would say:  I have reached the point in my life where I hear sounds that are not there and don't hear sounds that are.

I can be walking in a hallway at work, someone is behind me and I think suddenly that I've heard this person call my name.  I turn around to ask what they want because I definitely don't want them to think I just ignored them - that would be worse - but I can see from their surprised expression that they are thinking, "Geez, where did THAT come from?"  We both shrug and I think, "Oh my goodness, where DID that come from?"

Another recent example of this phenomena:  my son Dennis says something to me about who-knows-what while standing next to me in the kitchen as I fry cutlets. I don't really catch what he says but I am feeling brave,  "Did you just say, Alex ate escargot?" I say this despite thinking it highly unlikely that my traveling-abroad son actually ate snails in a pub in England.  Dennis thinks it is amusing how far off the mark I am.  Lucky for me, I think so too.

Just as an aside, Alex eventually did eat escargot, but it was in Paris a few weeks later, so maybe I'm just clairvoyant and what I hear inside my head is not just made up stuff.  Now, if I can only hear the lottery numbers.  Please.

I can also effectively block out the entire world if I wish to.  I have honed this art to perfection while living with children, dogs and very, very loud macaws.  I can create a bubble around myself no matter where I am or what I am doing and just float happily inside, neither listening to nor caring what is going on around me.  This is a nice trick that comes in handy and amazes anyone who witnesses it first-hand though these same amazed people are usually also annoyed that I just completely ignored them.

For most of my life I have had good hearing at the high notes and bad hearing at the low.  This state has changed recently.   After my last hearing test,  I was told that the higher pitches are also now tanking. Since hearing lost is hearing never to be found, it appears I am one step closer to the Miracle Ear.

And while we are on the subject, I might as well confess that the rest of my physical senses are also only shadows of what they once were.  I don't drive any place unfamiliar at night because I can't read the road signs until I am right under them.  The glorious scent of the sea which once had the power to make me instantaneously blissful, is almost totally lost to me.  Pain exists in more parts of my body than I can get pleasure from, so enough said there.  Thankfully, I can still taste food fairly well, at least for now, and maybe that's one reason my weight seems to rise with my age.

But the point of mentioning all this is not to lament the losses inherent to aging but to celebrate what the loss makes room for.  There are certainly plenty of worse things in this world than fading senses.  In fact, what I have found to be true for me is that as the external physical senses have faded, the internal, eternal sense is growing. And this is a darn good thing.

The internal, eternal sense is the ones that scientists don't know exists.  But it does.  It's just like when we were growing up, scientists did not know why the dinosaurs disappeared.  There had to be a cause; everyone knew there had to be a cause.  Now we know what that cause was: a giant meteor from outer space landed in Mexico, wiping them all out.  In 1968, who would have thunk it?

One day, maybe scientists will be able to identify the sense that grows in place of the ones that fade.  And I'm guessing that maybe they'll call it: wisdom.

When I was younger, my eyes saw only what was plainly in front of of me.  Now I can see further into the shadows where things are hidden.  Where once I trusted only what was "out there;"  now I can trust what lies "in here." Where once I sought to BE beautiful, smart, successful; now I seek these things for others.  Where once I might have done wrong because it was easy; now I am inclined to do right regardless of cost.   And where once I could not block out the madness of the world; I can finally hear the silence within.

There is peace in all this, and a sense that aging is not quite all the loss I expected it to be.