Legacy Writing 365:17

I do remember things from long ago. I couldn’t tell you Tom’s cell phone number now, but I can tell you my family’s phone numbers from my seventh through twelfth grades.

I have to look up Jim’s address every time, even though I’ve sent him a zillion pieces of mail over the years, but I can remember our street address from when I was six.

And I remember events, too, because since the days when I was still chewing my tomato sandwiches with my mouth open, I was mentally filing stuff away for future writing and calling it “research.”

Also, in case I need my memory jogged, I have a big plastic bin full of journals dating back to when I was fourteen. I don’t look at them. I’m glad they’re there, deep in the recesses of a closet. I kept them for a reason, and the reason continues to feel valid.

Now, about my friend James.

James purges. I swear he can get rid of anything. He can hold something sacred for years and then decide it would be more meaningful if he let it go, so–POOF! Gone. This makes me–the journal hoarder–a little crazy to think about. But it’s history, I wail, your personal history. And he says something insane like, “What I need to remember is in my head. If it’s not, I probably forgot it for a reason.”

Whatever, Mr. Mature and Logical.

When Tom and I began seriously thinking of estate planning, that bin of journals weighed on me. Because–I know this will shock you, so brace yourselves–I’m just like everyone else in that shitty stuff has happened in my life, and sometimes it was my fault, and sometimes it wasn’t, and I have known rage and jealousy and pettiness and a vicious desire to say cruel and hateful things. But I mostly said them with a pen to pages that no one would ever read but me. And the thought of people reading those things, things that were maybe about THEM, made me squeamish. Because how you felt that night in nineteen-eighty-whatever was real, but it passed, and you no longer feel that now. (If you do, you need to get rid of a lot more baggage than a bunch of journals.)

So when a large gathering of people I know and love converged in Manhattan in 2001, I took James aside and spoke to him about that bin of journals.

It went something like this.

“If something happens to me, I know you are the one person who will never let anyone else read them. And will never read them yourself. I know you’ll have some kind of Zen ritual in which you put a match to them and set them adrift on a lake, releasing all the ashes and smoke to the Universe. And that you’ll never even tell anyone you smuggled them out of my house or had access to them. That no one will ever know from you that they even existed. This is how much I trust you.”

“I’m honored,” James said. “And I will do what you say.”

Then we walked into the Renaissance Diner, where all our friends awaited us, and he turned to me and quite audibly said, “I can’t believe if you die I get all your journals!”

I only wish I’d just taken a swallow of Coke or something, because I laughed so hard I could have left a Jackson Pollock on the wall.

A year or so after that night, I actually took out some of those journals and looked at specific time periods, wondering how bad it would be.

And it wasn’t. Even the people who did damage to my soul so deep that you’ll never hear about them on this blog–I seem to have understood that we were all just bumping up against each other in that great effort called “growing up,” and sometimes bumping into each other hurts.

From time to time, someone from my past will surface and apologize, or at least think an apology may be needed, for something that happened long ago. It surprises me, because when I think of them, I think of them with affection and remember tons of good stuff about them and fun (and maybe a little crazy) times we shared. Their tentative apologies have actually been a relief because they help me believe that people who I think I wronged or hurt probably don’t even remember those things that haunt me on nights I deal with insomnia.

If they do remember, I hope they don’t blog.

Fiction is good. A fiction writer can access that mental filing cabinet of “research” and weave it into stories. Accuracy doesn’t matter. A fiction writer can blend and reshape and revise events and people into composites. I suppose for some people, fiction writing is a type of therapy. For others, it’s a weapon. I don’t want any of my writing to be either of those.

Before there was Bart Simpson, Matt Groening created one of my favorite characters, Bongo, featured in the Hell series that I shot for the top photo: Love Is Hell, Work Is Hell, School Is Hell, Childhood Is Hell. In my Legacy Writing blog entries, if there’s ever a need for accountability and blame, I’m with Bongo, who borrowed a phrase from certain Nixon aides and also Reagan.