ThatGrrl

I began writing my own journals/ diaries as a kid in the early 1970's. There are at least eight books, most of them full of my thoughts, blabs, and so on. As I have moved from place to place along my life the books became collected in a plastic container with a lot of photos I'd taken from trips to BC, visiting my Aunt Emma and wandering around Vancouver, staying at hostels and hotels. Travelling on the Greyhound bus, which doesn't have that cross Canada route any longer. Family and cat photos too. the odd hand written page about this and that. Ephemera collected from my adventures.

I had seen the box, less than a year ago, stuck in the garage where my brother had put it. I didn't move it into the house, mostly because I live in one room and didn't have space for it. Of course, not every decision made due to laziness, indecision, etc. is not always the best choice. Earlier this year my brother began clearing out everything from the garage. He found the garage was infested with mice and rats from the past tenants leaving a lot of garbage in it, outside of the garbage put out in the regular pick up. I noticed the lid of my container was cracked, it wasn't before. But, again I put off doing much about it because I didn't want to figure out what to do with it. I looked at getting a new container for it, but didn't get one. So it sat outside in rain and I thought it was safe with another box on top of it to block water and it was under the roof of the garage, outside.

Today, my Mom opened it and found the water has gotten in. Mostly everything is damaged, some of it is ruined and it really stinks! I can see fungus/ mold on it. I can still smell it, even though I've washed my hands several times, changed clothes and left all of it out in the laundry room.

The plan is to sort through the photos and pick out what to keep. Most are ruined, all the ink/colour washed away from the paper. Some of them still have an image left in the centre. So, a few I have saved so far. Some (not many) are untouched by water. Ironically, most of them are from my wedding and I don't really care about them as much. There are a lot of them which were dripping wet still and hugely stink. I will try to sort them today. But, I have little hope for them.

I think I will bring my scanner out, hook it up to my laptop and scan all the old journals. Better than retyping them, I would have my original hand written pages, just made digital and less mildew and moldy. Then, sadly, I will throw away all those pages and books I've kept for so long.

The next thing is what to do with all those scanned pages. I guess I can post them here, as images with dates. That will make this a really long/ old blog. I think the earlies pages are from before the 1970's. One nice thing about scanning them is being able to see my penmanship over the years too. Retyping them can't do that. Plus, retyping them would mean guessing what some of them are. Instead of leaving it as original to figure out more than just once. Handwriting isn't as reliable as type, but its far more personal and artsy.

Anyway, that's what I will be doing over the next few weeks. I think it will be sad to dispose of the old journals themselves. All those originals. Some of them I still remember who gave me the blank journal or where I bought them from. I guess I can add that to the notes as I scan and post them.

I have written in a book. A book I owned not one borrowed from someone else or a library. Also, not a book I was going to trade in at my local secondhand bookstore for more secondhand books. So, I didn't feel it was defacing the book, but it still felt as if I were breaking some kind of cultural barrier.

Quoted from the Amazon book description of "The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces" by Stephen Orgel.

"One of the most commonplace aspects of old books is the fact that people wrote in them, something that, until very recently, has infuriated modern collectors and librarians. ... The underlying question is at what point marginalia, the legible incorporation of the work of reading into the text of the book, became a way of defacing it rather than of increasing its value-why did we want books to lose their history?"

I made notes about what I was thinking as I read the book. I made wonderful notes I wish I could read again now and be inspired by what I thought years ago when I first read the book. But, I gave the book to someone else to read and they didn't value it the way I did. It's gone. I don't even know if they read it cover to cover as I did, or just humoured me when I said how wonderful I thought it was.

Beyond that sad little story, I think people who write in a book are those who did find more inspiration, more to explore, in the book than the people who read it (maybe even loved it too) but did not leave any notes. Leaving a note, making that decision and acting upon it to crack into the pristine pages of a book... it takes guts, for lack of a better word. Writing in a book, leaving a mark is one thing, quite a thing for some. But, that's just the start. Your personal thoughts are there, exposed, for as long as that book is still around.

A book has to be burned to be destroyed. Throwing it into the garbage is not a final end. Someone could still pick it out, clean it up a bit and read it. Composting, is closer to an end, but that takes time. Quite a lot of time and you're not going to be there to guard the spot where its composting for as long as it would take for that book to break down. So, your thoughts will be there beyond the time it takes to jot them down.

Knowing and thinking about all of this, would you write in a book? I still do.