My daughter says I need a blog!

I am a journal writer, not a blogger. I have a notebook in which I write sporadically. I used to write primarily when I was unhappy. I found it useful to look back and realize that whatever I was fretting about had diminished. Then as I got older I used it as a memory device. There were events, places, people that I wanted to remember. Writing them down helped me do this. I have a collection, now, of about 20 composition notebooks ( the kind with the marbleized covers) covering a span of about 30 years. When I have to travel by air, I select one at random and read it. Sometimes they make me laugh but always I get perspective. "The unexamined life is not worth living" as Socrates is supposed to have said. The last 5 journals have illlustrations, photos and clippings. Again, my daughter's influence and the advent of digital photography.

My father died 2 years ago and my mother has reached a stage in her life where her mobility is severely limited, her mental powers are sometimes fuzzy and she is becoming more child-like in her demands for emotional as well as physical support. When she decided to subsist on tea and biscuits during the day and alcohol and potato chips at night we moved her into an assisted living facility. Slowly I am beginning the task of sorting through the accumulations of a 50 year marriage. The usual photos, bibelots, tchotchkes. Hundreds of items of clothing ( my mother shopped as a hobby) many with the tags still attached. As I folded up the clothes for Goodwill it was like sifting through the layers of an archaeological dig. The layer of chenille sweaters, the next layer of shirts with shoulder pads, the collection of 1970's silk blouses, the corduroy jumpers and turtle necks. Having helped my mother pack all these clothes a few years prior I knew that she could identify each piece, and tell a story about where she bought it, who she was shopping with, and if it was a successful piece on what occasion it had been worn. My mother's life story is told in her clothes. My life story is in my notebooks. Will anyone ever read them? Indeed would I want them to? The most likely reader would be the self same daughter that prompted this blog. Would she really want to wade through a rather large collection of often undecipherable scribble? Further more wouldn't some of what I had written cause her pain? After all I had written these notebooks for my self. I used them as a vehicle to vent, to say the things that should not be said out loud. Even I don't agree with some of my conclusions when I go back later.

So maybe that is a function of a blog. A journal for public consumption.