I Had a Journal When It Was Still Cool to Have One

I had a journal when I was eight years old. 1981. The first entry talks about my parents buying a color TV. Not the first people in the building but thankfully not the last. The second entry talks about a phone call in the middle of the night and my father telling us his uncle was dead. I cried myself to sleep.

Then comes this little fun story. A few of us were playing soccer for a while. Then, a young couple sat on a bench overlooking the field, and started making out. One by one, we left the game and moved to the bench next to the couple. I don’t remember that but I’m sure it happened because I made a drawing of two stick figures on a bench, and the man’s thin stick-figure hand reaches out for the two circles in the middle of the woman-stick-figure’s body.

Then I have a movie review. My mom took my sister and me to see Les Miserables (the Anthony Perkins version), and for about ten pages I retold the story of Jean Valjean. The color TV was a page and a half, my first encounter with death was about a page, and so was my first encounter with the glory of boobies. And a retelling of Les Miserables was ten pages. I needed an editor.

I probably still do.

The diary lasted a month, and then, like in so many other instances, I moved on. Maybe my parents bought me the Commodore 64, or maybe I ran out of pages and didn’t think of asking for another notebook, but there end my written childhood memories.