Journey of Old Journals-1982

 In this journal, I wrote about the disjointed unity of the June 12th rally for nuclear disarmament in 1982. Nearly a million people gathered in Central Park that day. 

That sentiment was reinforced by this blog post, which recognized the power of the gathering; the author calls out the intersectionality of poverty,  war toys, Latin American foreign policy, and racism.

Life went on. I wrote about a friend's elderly Siamese cat who bit my bit me right on the nose when I was petting her. After taking the cat to the vet, I expressed concerns to her owner. I could tell the cat was dying and yet the vet was doing marginal “vitamin treatments”, which didn’t appear helpful.

I lived in a group house with a number of other students close to campus. I shared a room with a difficult personality, who once watched me create a pile of cooked cookies, delighting in the fact that I didn’t know to put them on a rack to cool. We had other conflicts in our shared room and I sensed her seething anger about what I thought was a stealthy simulation habit I pursued to relax. Truly, I thought she was already asleep herself. Little did I know she was a light sleeper. 

I came home from college when my grandmother died. I remember being in her room as she passed and the profound regret of not learning more about her life when she was alive. That’s a topic for another post…

A professor inspiration to look to dogs for stress management because they were rested and relaxed until the moment they were triggered into action. I’d tucked a mimeographed “How to tell if you are a stress-prone personality” quiz into the journal. My score was off the charts. Dr. Rosalind Forbes’ adapted quiz is here. 

I think I was taking a creative writing class and had a lot of angst about not having any ideas for stories. I was surrounded by creative people, yet felt completely disabled in forming worlds in my own mind. Again writing about all the internal machinations, not directing it into the creation of new work.

Falling in with the lesbian posse, I found a group to belong to and it was only a question of time before relationships became intimate. In my “practice letters”,  I referred to one lover as a perfect pine cone, then became increasingly disenchanted as she burned dinner while she was passed out from drinking.  I was getting feedback from the others that this wasn’t a good idea, but I couldn't let go for a while. My friends were chagrined, as I think they knew that she had been double-timing me.  I remember I wrote about being very excited to be alone again. That's where I felt comfortable

The journal ends with moving in with G. We shook on the deal not to sleep with each other when we lived together.  Weeks later, there were continued overtures.  Our house was way out of town, cheap and cold.  We moved in on January 1st, 1983. The son of the recently passed mother lived downstairs. He showed me how to use a microwave, a novel technology at the time. A young Welsh woman on work-study stayed with us for a semester which forced the issue of sharing a bed. On a beautiful spring day, I begged off staying in bed and instead went out to the gardens that were alongside the house and cleared off old leaves. The bulbs were emerging, as they do.  The elderly neighbors next door were excited. neighbors were so excited. They brought me in for a cup of tea, the calendar on the wall reflecting the local feed store, and crocheted dishcloths the likes of which I hadn’t seen before. 

In hindsight, I don't remember what the blossoms looked like from the garden.  I remember a horrific lung infection and coughing. G made an onion poultice for my chest, continuing to push for a relationship when really I wanted to be left alone.

My love of flow charts!

Journey of Old Journals-1982

 

I didn't put dates in this journal ~except for the first page at the beginning and the last page at the end.  This rambling discombobulated notebook doesn’t contain a lot of strong sentences of time and place, instead more internal musings and recycled poetry themes.  

However, it became clear at this point that  I was using the journal for my own best friend,  a practice that remains true to this day. This new format also facilitated some more flow. There's a page where I gush on and on about the ability to just free write on anything. I wrote about what was happening In my mind, not what was happening in the world.

Here are a few things that happened during this time:

• I became increasingly concerned and “radicalized” around the issue of Mutually Assured Destruction, which was the banter of the military justification at the time.

• I supported the World Peace March as the group traveled through Buffalo and Fredonia. What I didn't write about, but remember vividly, was the very strong proposition from one of the young men in the group. He did his best to entice me into a wild field clear we could just get it on. his hips vibrated wildly in desperation. It felt pathetic. 

• I was coming out as a lesbian and fell in love with H.  New emotions, intensity, navigating an unfamiliar path. I also felt accepted and part of a group, the first time since my party-buddies in High School.

• I wrote about being away for the weekend with the gal team and coming back to find obscenities written on my dorm door.

• An across the hall dorm neighbor stole a couple of my syringes for drugs. I have lots of letters from her, too. We were close for most of college and a couple of years after. 

• I moved off-campus for the summer~  I didn't return to Poughkeepsie for the first time in my life. I found a job working with my buddies on a vineyard In Western New York where I trimmed overgrown grapevines grown for the Welch brand amid asparagus gone to seed and the miracle of ladybugs piled on top of each other, everywhere. 

Journey of Old Journals- 1981?

This journal was an assignment for a "women in literature" class; the professor directed us to read and respond to the text we were reading at the time. 

In hindsight,  I can see my beginning as a feminist and as an advocate for peace. I remembered a detail–  I’d put effort into setting up Draft Counseling Center on campus, resurrected when the registration requirement resumed in 1980. 

I wondered if children could write poetry on an LCD screen.

I wrote about my mother, who worked so hard in her first term at Community College.  She received a D+ on her first term paper. Mom did her homework at the kitchen table. The phone rang, the dog scratched to go out, J asks where his jeans are and B returns from a liaison with her boyfriend.  The phone rings again, and dad asks a monetary question.  Mom thinks about what to have for dinner, about tomorrow's errands, the dog's vet appointment, and her mind drifts back to the empty page. Her letters are rushed, I observed and thought to myself that she deserved a desk and a room of her own. 

During a discussion of the Sapphic meter, my Latin teacher asked the class what female poets were called. “They are poets,'' I replied and elaborated that it was there was no use in using a diminutive term for those of the female gender. My classmates thought I was radical. 

Journey of Old Journals- 1981

 

Beginning in the second semester of my freshman year, I begin to hit my stride. I'm getting great feedback from professors, classes are resonating, and I'm feeling the groove on the college experience. 

Conflicts persist with my freshman roommate, Barbara, who irons for relaxation. Pressing underwear and t-shirts fills her time when she isn't occupied with her boyfriend. She confesses to me that she'll never be without a man. Then, she kicks me out of the dorm room when she needed private time with the current one. 

The journal contains a few notes written on the eve of my sister's birthday, sharing my story of the time I let go of my younger brother while we were twirling around in anticipation of her party.  The story begins with me at the core, spinning my brother around with outstretched arms, our laugher as his feet leave the floor.  Energy abounds. 

The doorbell rang, and for a second my attention drifted, then I released him into a very large ground floor window. I hear the breaking glass, the screams of his 5-year-old self, his head hanging there. The shards cut my fingers as I got him loose.  B yells at me for ruining everything, and mom is calling the emergency room, and then reaching all of the parents of the invitees telling them not to come. I'm given a cold washcloth and told to press it to his forehead. Blood drips on the floor the drops extending like sun rays.  After my mom drives to the emergency room, I stand in the driveway to tell all the mothers that the party is off.  16 stitches, a Frankenstein-like scar on his forehead, and me still carrying this with me, still, 50 years later.  

I wrote of other traumas of the past and even those that occurred in the months of this journal. These, I am not ready to share here.  I saved the pages, however, to sit with at a later time. 

December

 

Journey of Old Journals: Nov-Jan 1981

 This journal begins with Halloween reflections of a party where I went in costume, drank too much, and ended up coming home without very specific memories of what happened, except for a discussion with a Sheik in an Arco suit.   

I wrote a letter to the teacher of a drawing class. I thought it would be fun to try art and see what would happen. Shortly after buying all the expensive supplies, I realized I was completely and totally out of my league. I'd gotten a C- on my poetry paper the previous day. The professor said, "look at what you did wrong" and laughed. I felt humiliated, inconsequential, and a bother from the others who were more worthy.  I knew I wasn't as good as the other students, who were likely taking the required course for the rest of their art degrees. 

I wrote of my volunteer work with the Help Service, a phone hotline open to the community, and made new friends. Now, I remember that we often killed time by flipping pencils into the ceiling tiles.  As the Thanksgiving holidays approached, I began to write more of my connections to the friends back home.  

We were a rambunctious bunch, heady in the days of ample access to marijuana, alcohol, and other drugs. There was a group of boys that I would meet at the train tracks down by the Hudson River. We would meet for beer, bonfires, guitars, and bad singing. Often, I was the only female. There was a fellow that was particularly sweet on me and I still have the beautiful wooden lap desk box he made for me. The group dynamics got complicated after I left for college (poor decisions when I returned home on breaks), and one particularly hilarious moment of car-necking when my knee hit a button on the radio and a radio host proclaimed, "Jesus died for your sins" and both of us collapsed into laugher.

The journal ends with narrating a near-miss accident with my family on a dark winter highway on the way home from Maine.  A car in front of us skidded on the ice, around and around, and crashed into the guard rail in front of us. As I contemplated the eventuality of death, I wrote a letter to my friends to be read at my funeral. 

"All I ask of you is ~when the summer nights are clear and the fire glows anew with another log~ that you sing those songs louder for me.  Friendship has always been a very important to me. The solace of your voices drifting up into the night with the flames will tell me that you think of me and the past times, however good or bad. I've always thought that one could anything when another human loves you.  When I'm gone, all I ask is that you smile and remember that you always crash land at reality airport. The river spirit flows on." 

And, in the final pages of the notebook dated early 1981, grumbling about my college roommate, I wrote, "I think I'll be a plant always looking for a pot, transplanted from home, adjustment periods, growing by still lacking real root space." 

I enrolled in W.S.I anyway. 

Journey of Old Journals-1981

Not much to see here folks. another year early in college as I was navigating through a new identity. I drank too much. I had a bad trip. There were a lot of internal ramblings. One of the telling gleanings from this journal is remembering A. I met when visiting a friend in Plattsburgh.

Something clicked,  or at least I had an opportunity to experience intimacy and jumped on it. Andrew wore a colostomy bag. It didn't bother me; it was just something to work around. And as a diabetic, I felt like this was part of the “isn’t this interesting” experience.  I had no judgment. 

I remember that he lived in a log cabin in the woods. His house was cold with the living area heated by a wood stove. His bed had many quilts on it,  and I was surrounded by the peace of the mountains for a few days. This was a very special experience as it happened, a glimpse and moment of time, nothing more. I created a love poem filled with images of the night sky and stars, of breezes and delicacy. “You are my north star”, I wrote.

He continued to think there would be an ongoing relationship. I thought there might be something if he had mustered up and slowed down, but then the entreatments were offputting. I may have created a  hole he hadn't known existed before, and now he sought more to fill what wasn’t there.  

After he wrote me yet another letter, I wrote a break-up poem. It was brutal. ‘He was just a sensitive worm unaccustomed to sunshine.  Therefore he got burned. I don't care anymore but I would have liked to see the infatuation of a few mountain days fade into a black night from pink purple sunset clouds. The Stars wink reminding me of the dreams you had.  Don't try to be my friend, former lover,  you're joblessly sinking like your bank account.

Later, I made a note. My friend’s friend, whose brother I’d hooked up with, told me that I’d broken his heart.  

“The writers’ task is to take one thing and make it stand for twenty.” ~Virginia Woolf