Pass It On: Rambling About Journals and Stumbling on Epiphanies

A few weeks ago, I was early for an appointment, so I detoured to the mall at the north end of Santa Barbara. Many of the stores are vacant, and the place has the ambience of a well groomed ghost town, but on an impulse I entered the still-in-business Macy’s. How eerily familiar it seemed! Racks of cheap garments, rows of chunky athletic shoes, displays of costume jewelry…all awash in stark department store lighting…and a sense of slow motion suspension from the world outside.

But we all know how smells can trigger memories, and it was the assault of scents from the cosmetic counter that really got to me. How often had I gone into Macy’s or Penney’s during my visits to Orange County to look in on my mother? I might stop into such places to brace myself beforehand or mindlessly soothe myself afterwards, but more typically, I would bring her with me. It was an outing for her, just a change of scene, and a chance to browse and see if there was anything she needed. She was always modest in her wants and shocked at the prices. She might touch a blouse and hold it up, but she would always put it back––too much. We would usually stop for ice cream on the way back, and that was a fool-proof source of pleasure.

Now, walking through this exact replica of one of those Orange County retail stores, I suddenly felt my mother’s presence at my side in an almost physical way. The experience was so tangible, I stopped short and closed my eyes for a moment. I could hear her voice, see the bangles on her thin wrists, her trusty cane.

My mother has been gone eight years now— she would have been one hundred years old this spring—and I’ve written about her a great deal in this blog, maybe too much, mostly about the years of looking in on her at the assisted living facility, and about how, despite (and because of) the difficulties and duties, I belatedly got to know and love her.

And so, standing in the Macy’s––a mundane and incongruous setting––I knew she was with me, truly with me, and after the inevitable aching in my heart, I felt an intense sense of gratitude for the memories of our little expeditions. I wish I had done more, but I am thankful for every time I took her away for a while, and for every single time I went out of my way to be kind to her. And I saw clearly that this is the only comfort, and there’s a lesson here: You never regret the kindness.

Imagine that? An epiphany in Macy’s. Life keeps teaching, even in the oddest corners.

So I’m thinking about lessons. What else have I learned? Gary Snyder answered the question this way:

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?
The moments
between hard pleasant tasks
To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.
- the first Calochortus flowers
and in all the land,
it’s spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs,
to Gen.
Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
But when you get it right,
you pass it on.

I’m afraid I’m not so good at tools, unless you count a garlic press, but I believe I am developing some expertise at recognizing those in-between moments when I can marvel at the yellow flowers and think my own “dry crusty thoughts.”

And when I write about those moments, they last longer, and I can glean in the process any lessons they contain. It occurs to me that this very blog is a way to share that learning, and perhaps to hold up snapshots of wonder. So I guess it’s essentially an old-fashioned journal, different only by virtue of the fact that it’s out there to be read, and a few of you are reading it.

Anyway, yesterday, we had a meeting of the Gaviota Writers (which was so special, I think I’ll write about it sometime soon) and at some point the topic of journals came up. I have a stack of them in the garage, awaiting their destiny, which is probably a shredder and a dumpster, but first I need to muster up the courage to look inside them one more time, just in case. I know they are all handwritten in pen, some in elegant cursive that deteriorates into erratic scratchings, and I know that many sections are painful and cringeworthy. How could I have ever imagined the shame and sadness I would someday feel about decisions I made and tried to justify on those pages? How could I have known how much I would someday yearn to see my father instead of writing angrily about how he kept trying to meddle in my life? And there are overwrought emotional passages about issues that now seem absurd.

Oh, there are little windows of joy too, here and there. I would probably glimpse my spirit emerging if I patiently read through these. I know I transcribed a dream I had in 1982, in which someone was chasing me, and instead of being paralyzed with fear as usual, my feet turned into wings, and I lifted off into the sky, and instead of being afraid of crashing to the ground, I felt a sense of ease and control. I flew! I became the pilot of my life that day.

Somewhere in those journals I describe the encounter I had with a feisty pair of badgers while I was riding my bicycle in El Morro Canyon. I am sure I wrote about ordinary pleasures I was just beginning to perceive as miraculous, and there are transcriptions of things my toddler daughter said…the beginnings of poetry…pure delight.

But we have far too many boxes, too much paper piled up. It’s time to streamline. No historian or descendent of mine will care to dig through these pages in search of significance. They served their purpose by the act of being written. These notebook journals will go.

That scrap above is all that remains of a little diary I kept in 1964, a diary I called Leonardo. (It was decidedly a diary to my teen-aged mind, as opposed to a journal, though I’m not sure what the distinction is.) Underneath the taped construction paper heart I had written the name of the boy I truly loved. Now all these years later, I poked my fingers into it only to find it empty.

But here's what I had written in pen on the other side, in the meticulous, touching printing of a thirteen-year-old girl:

Dearest Leo, I have used you all up. You know confidential thoughts and secrets I would reveal to no one else. Believe me, I have loved you for your silent friendship, ever true when I needed your help. Here is a poem for you: “Ever true, when mortals won’t do,/My secrets you know, and will never show/Silent loving friend, though on this page you end, with you I’ll never part/You are always in my heart.”

Always in my heart, that's where dearest Leo dwells, and he's still in there somewhere, of that you can be sure. Life hasn't entirely beaten from me a certain dreaminess and hopefulness, an approach that won't entirely conform to good sense, a trove of hearts and stars and wishes still sparkling underneath the dust.

Apparently I found it necessary to destroy all but this last page of my "silent loving friend" shortly after his creation, lest unworthy mortals uncover the secrets I had shared with him. (Not that I was given to melodrama.)

And now I share quite abundantly on this platform, easily viewed by mortals far and wide, not that great numbers of them care. But what a world! So much intimacy and accessibility, and yet so little. But if the Internet is a mighty river of the best and worst of humanity, I like to think I am adding a gentle whisper to the river, and I know the whispers sometimes find their way to receptive souls.

Words on a page, words in the multiverse, words in a living room or along the trail, friend-to-friend.

Richard Blanco, in his poem, Say This Isn’t The End, concludes: