First entry had dateline of New York but was from Upstate enroute to Montreal. I’m thinking this was from a family trip taking the Thruway to Syracuse and then I-81 due north to the Thousand Islands region. Pittsburgh, Toronto, and Cleveland were likely on an earlier trip.

 

Big, bossy women with rough, powdered faces. Big cars. Big-nosed men. The resorts, once elegant, rambling, now crowded, rundown, shabby. Poor cottages deface the landscape. Everywhere cheap tawdriness of sightseeing boats, lying pamphlets, expensive everywhere: highways, bridges.

And then MONTREAL.

Busy, cosmopolitan, the women proud to be women, they carry their heads high, proud, elegant, fashionable. Men handsome, dark, longish [styled] hair – many artsy, with sandals. Both sexes seem to enjoy themselves, full of life. The center of the city is vast, exciting, filled at night with people. The Place Ville-Marie is the most beautiful large-scale design I have ever seen: four tall office towers with a plaza, under which is a gallerie de boutiques, small but expensive shops that stretch under the street to the central subway station and the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, the city’s proudest. Everywhere construction of clean, modern glass-wall offices. But driving is nervous, quick, dangerous. Most cars are dented and crushed in, somewhere. Everybody parks in “no parking” zones. Little wonder so many take the legions of taxis or numerous buses (fare just 20 cents). Live theater abounds, as well as cinema. Visiting cultural events abound: New York Philharmonic, La Scala Opera, Hamburg Theater.

The city’s filled with apartments, many with outside stairs leading to the second and third floors. Everything in French, one finds difficulty in common communication. It is like being in Europe or some obscure corner of New York City.

We see the Expo area tomorrow. [Was it under construction? The fair took place over the summer of ’67.]

Sorry, janitor, restroom writers have struck again.

Montreal was the first city I encountered that wasn’t awash in suburbs.

~*~

Western Quebec/Eastern Ontario: Flat country that must be cruel in winer. Woods of birch, maple, and pine. Houses of brick, steep-roofed, and without ornamentation. The land is sparsely settled, with many unpainted, storm-beaten frame houses graying into ruin.

My guess this was the summer of ’66, perhaps at the end of summer. Our last family vacation?

 ~*~

From Spiralbound Years with commentary from now.

 

So how is it my Dick Allen notes from Wright State were in an Indiana University 3-subject divider book? Or that it ended with apparently Nashville [Indiana] observations? Did we visit campus first? Not that I remember! Or was it a gift from someone? Now I must wonder about my first sight of the campus.

A gift from Fay, I suppose. No, I rather assume now. She had, after all, gone off to school at Purdue in another corner of the Hoosier state. Besides, she had a devilish sense of humor and could have given me one of those instead. The two schools were Big Ten rivals, after all.

My notes included advice on five-paragraph examination-essay model and counsel to use the prof’s keywords in it.

Symbolic logic notes, too, which I no longer understand yet still admire.

Every sentence is either true or false.

Of the 1,750 dailies in U.S. in 1967, 75% had circulations of less than 25,000; 30% of readers bought the paper for sports.

Women as accessories: disposable.

When sex doesn’t deliver the goods?

Essayists must write from minority viewpoint.

Self-doubt: YOU WRITE FROM YOUR GUT.

WRITER SHOULD HAVE AN OPINION, RIGHT OR WRONG.

[what a contrast to neutral, objective journalist!]

“You can never write a perfect sentence. The perfect sentence does not exist. If you spent all your time trying to perfect your writing, you’d never publish.”

Bev Strampher: “I’m getting sick and tired of reading about all these neurotic people with weird hang-ups who do nothing but fight and argue.”

What kind of effect to I want? Who is my ideal reader and how will I hit him? (Him? It’s HER! Maybe Nicki was my ideal reader, at least with my Indiana Daily Student newspaper column.)

BECOME AN AUTHORITY … so I have, Quaker!

Build career on chain of interests.

Writers are NOT discovered … it’s politics.

Journalism not conducive to good writing/reading, does not know what to do with art writing; love of words is taken away from readers; most people are not asked to become involved.

Writers are sex-obsessed (sez our prof).

Writer should have an opinion, right or wrong.

Few professors are intellectuals.

Allen: “In 20 years, you will be better than Tom Wolfe. … You’ll be wasting your time in newspaper work.”

Transitions are artificial.

Forbidden subjects are usually the funniest: sex, politics, religion.

INSTANT HISTORY.

My ballpoint-pen ink bleeding through the pages.

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Years with commentary from now.

Here I thought I had thoroughly gleaned these for the fiction and poetry. In my keyboarding and review, I skip over those passages, though there are far fewer of them than I would have predicted.

Instead, here’s a rapid-fire sampling from one early volume.

~*~

Love? Every treasure is guarded by a dragon.

Man’s need to play is justified, and should be. [A revelation for oh-so-serious me, one I would have to rediscover post-Clara.]

Handbook in identity: focusing upon one partner, reaches deeper – seeks rewarding depth, dealing with another self.

Just what novel were we discussing? As for me, my needs were simple: she must be beautiful, intelligent, and younger than me … and available. In reality, she also needs to know how to steer me, which is why an older girlfriend might have been preferable. Speaking of what-ifs, I keep returning to my psychology lab partner at IU: how beautiful and, what I never saw, how available! But what did I have to offer her? [Boy, did I blow that one!]

Jobs relieved of personality: the sexual side is the only side of life where intimacy exists. Yet sex doesn’t deliver the goods.

Sex used to be one of the few places where you could make a mistake. Today, however, competitive force and efficiency are entering the bedroom …

Don Juan vs Tristan: you can’t have both.

“The last time I was at a Playboy Club, I found the same type that you’d find at a Mantovani concert.”

To the family in Mexico: Dad, Mom, 24 kids. “And since you don’t have TV, radio, movies, books, what do you do for entertainment?” Or now that they do?

Round characters have many qualities that don’t quite fit together.

“I didn’t mean to knock your dress. I like it.”

“What’s that you’re muttering?”

Comedy depends upon distance.

Always remember protagonist and antagonist in story summary.

Symbol goes beyond metaphor.

Reason is impotent to deal with the depths of human life.

Alienation.

League of Freshman Voters.

(Some bad stabs at poetry / song lyrics).

Irving Kolodin re Music Hall in Cincinnati: “I find the sense of emptiness around the orchestra” … ditto, the hall, too. Not that I noticed it in the second balcony, where the acoustics were incredibly clear.

The volume?

[Incinerated]

~*~

From Spiralbound Years with commentary from now.

It’s a good thing I backed off from my nearly impetuous move last June to simply burn the spiralbound notebooks unread in the face of so much dross. Instead, I plodded onward, surprised by a few gems as well as how little I had gleaned from these pages in drafting my poetry and, especially, fiction. Perhaps I had much more than I thought in my long-vanished correspondence.

Do we ever, truly, escape our past?

~*~

One thing I’m noticing is how often my journals review corrects timelines from the way I’ve constructed them in memory.

As do the facts I recorded versus details as I’ve recalled them.

It’s like seeing a photo in full color rather than out-of-focus black-and-white.

Or, as I find, God exists in the details. As does the devil. Knowing the difference can be crucial.

~*~

One thing I’ve learned in the years since is the importance of composting as a gardener.

Combine that with the joy of tasting fresh food – say, strawberries – when the season rolls around again.

The past can enrich the present.

Maybe even turn grief into gratitude.

My journaling erupted as an attempt to record my failings in attempting to connect romantically after the flight of my college lover, the one you’ll know as Nicki.

As I’ve learned since, the difficulties ran much deeper than just her. It would involve questions of how I saw females, or didn’t, in looking for a lifetime mate. As I’ve come to see, that’s not necessarily “partner.” Candidly, I was looking for an accessory more than a fitting true equal.

Instead, I had a morbid desire for Nikki and previously Fay, who was a passionate girlfriend. As I see now, I’ve been prone to a pathological loyalty for good times together.

~*~

The sweep though the post-college great dark period when I started journaling greatly revises my perception of that time. I was meeting young women, sizing them up, but not connecting sexually because, as I now sense, I was so morbidly hung up on Nikki and, to my surprise, Fay from two years earlier. Fact was I didn’t see any of them deeply, as feeling and emotions: only as factoids: that’s how I spoke too! Fact, fact, fact. Not passions.

~*~

Another part of “my problem” was simply in not fitting in easily with so much around me. So the entries become an exploration of developing a better sense of myself, often through the reflections of people close to me.

There will even be some astrological perspectives I encountered along the way.

~*~

Leap ahead a bit more than a half century. To set upon this review, I had to extract 20 or so milk crates from the storage confines in a former chimney cavity in our new (though historic) home. In my previous settings, those crates were set up on their sides and stacked as impromptu bookcases. We really didn’t have the luxury of doing that here. As I was saying about downsizing?

In revisiting the earliest notebooks, expecting to find hidden gems, an immense heaviness engulfed me. These were conditions I had left, for good reason. These were individuals and groups who long ago went in other directions than mine. Do I even know their names – full names – anymore?

Most of the volumes had been heavily dredged in my writing sabbatical of 1986-87 for details to distill into my novels. Others had been mined for poems. These journals were mostly spiralbound notebooks – some in my favored 8½-by-14 dimension.

By late spring last year, I was leaning toward disposing them without further examination. They cover the years from my college graduation through Upstate New York and then the yoga ashram in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, small-town Ohio, Indiana University as a social sciences editor, and the interior Pacific Northwest – and that’s just the first decade. Next came a river city in Iowa, Rust Belt, Baltimore, and New Hampshire.

~*~

The volumes do provide of trove of my interactions in my post-Nikki round of lovers in Binghamton, and then my first marriage and divorce, as well as the subsequent engagement and later relationships leading up to my remarriage in 2000.

Curiously, beyond my sabbatical, meaning the second half of my life, i.e. New England? I see nothing that promises fiction. What I had assumed the great passion of that broken engagement would have inspired now appears banal, even tawdry.

For now, I’m finding enough gleanings to do something along the lines of Rorem’s Paris Journals, though maybe mine become Spiralbound Binghamton, Spiralbound Yoga, and so on, acknowledging the earliest volumes. I didn’t splurge on hardbound pages until Clara was no longer sleeping with me – volume 77. Clara? She’s a dozen years ahead. Still, there would be a few more spiralbound notebooks – six – plus 13 spiralbound sketchbooks and softcover sketchbooks to come.

Some of my notebooks predated the start of my journaling. One, for instance, covered day camp policies, program guidelines, songs, good storytelling guidelines.

All of these song titles, the words and tunes I’ve long forgotten.

We had so much responsibility! (And life itself was still so fuzzy. Largely a blur, I’d say now.)

“Any injury multiplied 10x by the time it reaches mother or father. Injury may be word or action.”

Taste buds: sweet, salt, sour, bitter … just four.

“All right, kiddies. If you get lost, stay there. I’ll come and find you (I hope).”

The most innocent looking kid bit another in the eye, tried opening the emergency door on the bus, hit kids over the head with a tote bag, waits for the counselors to look away, lies, swimming (?)

(Last time I was “home,” meaning my father’s funeral, I tried locating the camp along country roads, to no avail. No clue to its site on satellite maps, either. Summer camp as one more victim of shortened summers off for kids, as well as economic realities facing families.)

Those were two summers I had a remarkable tan. My hair turned nearly blond, too.

~*~

From Spiralbound Years with commentary from now.

A while back, revisiting my high school yearbooks in a search for additional first names befitting the times of a story I was revising, I was shocked even appalled to admit how physically ugly so many of my classmates were, not that I was a prime example of emerging manhood. Some even had aspirational birth names, yet our uptight upbringing would be difficult to escape, as I was perceiving. Even those I considered alluring typically fell short in the longer haul.

Physically, at least, some people appear doomed from birth. And just what were their parents thinking when it came to first names like Jethro or Candy?

What if my fiction had delved into that darkness, rather than my idealized escape?

At the least, it was something I might have engaged in my psychological therapy sessions but didn’t. Add to that, my scope of ministry since.

 

WITHOUT MUCH HARD EVIDENCE (meaning journals or perhaps snide notes) to fall back on, my high school years are blurry. As I posted last May, I didn’t start journaling until I graduated from college, even though when I was winding down a summer internship a few weeks before the beginning of my junior year, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper where I was working a pivotal internship called me into his office for a parting chat. He strongly suggested, make that urged, I begin keeping a journal, a practice he found invaluable in life. He also counseled me to change my major from journalism to “something that will expand your mind – we can teach you to write news stories and headlines as part of the job.”

On my return to campus, I did change my major, to political science, along with sizable chunks of literature (Indiana University had both comparative literature and traditional English programs) along with economics. Maybe I should blame Glenn Thompson for much of my wide, maybe overly wide, range of focus since.

My journaling, though, didn’t begin until nearly two years later, after graduation, and then somehow not quite by intention. I just started scribbling during a tempestuous, unanticipated week’s trek in Montana and Utah, which was also my introduction to the Far West.

Now, as I delve into the pages, some of the general impressions I presented in that post need refinement. For one thing, contrary to many of the later years, I had periods in that first decade of making detailed entries daily, rather than week-to-week or so that became common later.

Candidly, as you’ll see, those were some rough times for me.

~*~

Here are the covers for three of the four high school yearbooks from my time there. I do admire the intense draftsmanship of the first, and will admit the last one was mine, pretty much on the fly when the original concept fell apart.

 

 

~*~

I HAD EXPECTED TO FIND my journaling volumes had been pretty well picked over in the drafting of my novels and poems but instead found many entries that remained untouched.

That led to keyboarding entries of flashes and insights before discarding the volumes one-by-one in ceremonial flames. The gleanings will get one final airing as I let go.

Quite simply, I see this as one less burden on my “survivors” after I pass but I do expect to draw heavily on the selected entries in my postings at the Barn this year.

Consider them Spiralbound Memories. Do note that I will be changing the names of some of the characters, in part to respect a bit of their privacy and in part to recognize that they likely saw the events quite differently.

If I had become famous, some unfortunate scholars would likely be poring over my many pedantic, even ghastly, pages of scribbling in personal journals that I’m instead purging. Ceremoniously incinerating, here on the craggy coast, far from my native Midwest, in a pale imitation of a Viking pulling up his ship at the end of a long voyage that landed him or me in what emerged as the mid-Atlantic states and then led, by degrees, to the Pacific Northwest before inching backward and ultimately winding up in this remote island in Maine.

There is, by the way, evidence to argue that Vikings had indeed landed here along Passamaquoddy Bay.

I’m not speaking of my novels and poems, which I do believe need a supportive discovery or rediscovery, but rather my 200-plus volumes of personal journals.

Yipes!

Of course, had I instead become fabulously rich, some poor souls would be tending to these details and making them look brilliant. Vanity, vanity.

Oh, for the dreams, dashed dreams, of youth and a few decades following. I can’t speak for you, but for my part, adulthood has turned out to be quite different from anything I had anticipated.

Trying to understand how it happened is another matter. Even at the time, you might see things and note them but not realize their import. Coming across a detail like that years later can be stunning. What if?

 

MY JOURNALS CULLING is another step in downsizing, one prompted by trying to fit my books and recordings into my new bedroom. At my age, I’m also cognizant of the burden they would place on those who survive me, as the phrase in obituaries goes. Besides, most of my 200-plus volumes haven’t been opened and revisited in years – at least since my novels were drafted and revised. Just what the heck remained in them?

Early on, I had a custom of revisiting the previous year’s notations as part of a Christmas Greetings and New Year’s reflection, but even that fell away sometime around the time of my remarriage. Frankly, everything changed at that point. Everything before became ancient history, abetted by my memory sieve.

One of my goals for the past year was to read through my journals one last time, keyboarding any gleanings that might still be useful and letting go of the rest. For the first dozen-and-a-half years after I graduated from college, my journaling took place in inexpensive spiralbound notebooks, hence the title for the series I’m introducing. The entries cover my moves from Indiana University to Upstate New York, followed by the yoga ashram in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, back to a small rust-belt town in Ohio and then returning to Indiana before leaping to the interior desert of the Pacific Northwest, and then rebounding to a troubled steel town in the Midwest.

There are good reasons I keep seeing myself as a fortunate survivor. We have lived through some wild times.

 

AS I’VE ANNOUNCED, I’ll be drawing heavily on those early entries in the posts here in the coming year. So much has changed in American life in the past half-century, and not just for me. Readers from elsewhere can weigh in as they will.

As for the remaining decades of journals? Please stay tuned before I strike the match.

Having revealed my blogging direction for the coming year, please allow me to fill in some of the background.

As we enter the Barn’s 14^th year, the merry-go-round concept continues, including Tendrils on Tuesdays and Kinisi on Sunday evenings. With our home renovation on pause, you’ll see fewer entries on that project, though one of its consequences will become the main focus over the year. To wit: As I posted last May, I need to downsize my possessions to fit into our new space, meaning collections, and my 200-some volumes of journaling have become a target. Frankly, I hadn’t opened most of those scribblings aka manuscripts in the past decade or two. Was I likely to do so in the next five years or so? Or would they continue to collect dust? As I was saying? Besides, do I want to burden my wife and daughters with one more burden to clean out when I’m no more? Heavens, no.

Setting forth five months after my New Year’s goal of culling those pages, I expected to find that the earliest volumes had been thoroughly mined in drafting my novels and poetry, and that what remained would be embarrassingly sophomoric. Well, many passages were. But there was enough other material I didn’t want to lose, which led to keyboarding those bits before ceremoniously burning the volumes themselves. More on that later in the season.

So far, I’ve gotten through the first decade after my graduation from college. Far more remained from what I had imagined.

As these appear here, perhaps they’ll work along the lines of Ned Rorem’s Paris Journals, though much less scandalously and thoroughly lacking celebrities. Who knows what morbid fascination you might engage.

I’ll try not to add too much context but rather let them pour forth largely unedited. You might feel something like an eavesdropper that way. Some of the identities may, however, be changed to protect the guilty.

With fewer photos here in the coming year, the Barn will be more word-driven, befitting a novelist and poet, but with a funky edge. As a “gentle reminder” I came across last year advised:

“Let life feel a little illegible sometimes. You’re not a quote. You’re not a theme. You’re a page with scribbles, rewrites, margin notes. Let it stay messy. That’s what makes it real.”

Thanks to YouBook Story at Instagram for that inspiration. Let’s see how it fits.

Onward, then!