30 years of journals

Stacked in a box and scattered among my bookshelves are various notebooks chronicling over 30 years of my life. 

I have Anne Frank to thank for that.

I've kept a diary off and on since I was 10 years old.  I no longer have the diaries I wrote in as a child and teenager.  The notebooks I have begin at the end of 1986 and continue on to the present. 

I first learned about Anne Frank in the 4th grade.  I don't remember learning about the Holocaust then, although I'm sure Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were mentioned.  What I remember is that there was a girl named Anne Frank, that she kept a diary, and she called it Kitty.  The lines I remember reading in our lesson on Anne Frank are:  "Anne had only begun to write.  If she had lived, her talent would have developed and grown."

When I started my very first diary, it was in one of those five year diaries that don't give you enough room to write in.  I called my diary Beth because Beth was my best friend in the 5th grade.  (I remember one of my entries was about how badly I'd performed in either kickball or softball and I wrote, "Dumb me, I'm bad in it.") 

I started seriously writing a diary in 8th grade and called it Carrie, after an imaginary character of mine that I developed into a book character.  That year that I was in 8th grade, I wrote a book about a girl gymnast named Carrie who went to the Olympics and won a gold medal.  This was in 1976 and Nadia Comaneci was one of my heroines.

I no longer address my diaries to an imaginary person, and I am not as consistent in writing in a journal as I probably should be.  And I don't know what's going to happen to those journals when I die.  I'm not sure if anyone would be interested in my life. 

I don't know what inspired Anne to want to keep a diary in the first place.  She says in her opening pages that she didn't have a real friend and she'd decided that her diary would be that friend. 

Today, June 12, 2019, would have been Anne's 90th birthday.  On June 12, 1929, she was born in Frankfurt, in Germany.  She was four years old, just barely starting to form memories, when her family left Germany and settled in Holland. 

June 12, 1942 was her 13th birthday.  That was the day where she "went to Mummy and Daddy and then to the sitting room to open my gifts.  The first to greet me was you, probably the nicest of all."  "You" was a red-checked notebook the size and dimensions of an autograph album.  In the front, she wrote, "I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely . . . and that you will be a great support and comfort to me." 

She didn't know at that moment what a "support and comfort" that diary would be.  Because less than a month later, she and her family, dressed in layers of clothing and walking in a pouring rain, would enter an office on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, climb up the back stairs to an attic, and not leave until August 4, 1944, the day they were arrested by the Nazis.

I visited Anne Frank's hiding place in 1996.  The longer I stayed there, the more claustrophobic I found the place.  That's when I decided that writing in her diary saved Anne's sanity.  What do you do when you're cooped up in an attic, you can't go out, you're bursting with energy, and the adults in your life may or may not be the greatest support to you?

You write. 

I'm not Jewish and I'm not a young girl forced into hiding by circumstances. 

But it's because of Anne that I write.

Today, she would have been 90.

Happy birthday.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.