I wonder what I was having trouble doing.
I had a horse and a dog at this point. The cats had all died. So had the white mice and the parakeets. Animals were my refuge. I suspect I was angry at my mother and wanted to convince myself to be gentle with her.
June 1, 2019 –
Paragraph 1. See introduction.
Paragraph 2. I remember so clearly the struggle I had not to become lazy and complacent. By any standards we were rich. I knew I had choices. I was enrolled in 4 advanced placement classes in an academically challenging private school. I didn’t know it then but I had mild dyslexia perhaps complicated by a pair of eyes that didn’t focus together (a condition called amblyopia, I was born with one crossed eye). I couldn’t catch a ball reliably. I read slowly. It would have been so easy to lie back and relax, become a “girly” girl like so many of my classmates were doing, Even so, learning was the game I was best at.
The very public conflicts my divorced parents had over money led me to my skeptical view of my potential earning power. My mother, who grew up sewing her own underwear on a chicken farm in upstate New York, had gotten into an extended custody battle over my brothers and me with my wealthy “Our Crowd” father 4 years ago. I still don’t know what details she kept from me but she made it perfectly clear that she went back to work because my bastard father cut her off, she was sacrificing for me and I was inadequately grateful. As you may read about later, my father was unsuccessful at disinheriting my adulthood self so, in complex ways, it turned out that my schooling really has not had much impact on my earning power or lifestyle.
It is significant that this early interest in the interaction among personal effort, job-related earning power and educational level has stayed so prominent in my mind that I am still writing about it. (See www.netaablog.wordpress.com)
Paragraph 3. I had just read Voltaire’s Candide for the first time. My preoccupation with appropriate use of superlatives is still with me as well.
Paragraph 4. I’m sure I hadn’t yet read Plato’s Republic so I expect the story of the cave was related to me by either parents or my older brother and his friends. I majored in philosophy in college and, to this day, consider myself a career “social philosopher”. Oh, the seeds we sew.
Paragraph 5. The school that I had been attending since second grade was nondenominational but certainly Christian in orientation. We were required to study both the Old and New Testament of the Christian Bible and to attend morning chapel three days a week. I was familiar with Exodus 3:14. I had also been exposed to Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. But, looking back almost 60 years, I suspect my existential crisis was more closely related to my increasingly tumultuous relationship with my mother than either religion (which was strictly forbidden by both my atheist parents) or philosophical texts that I had heard about but not yet read. It’s ironic that gratitude is a hot topic among members of the “self-help” crowd today.
Paragraph 6. I’m still haunted by what I called ’ostentation’ at 15. At that time people used to accuse me of being ‘conceited’, of thinking I was somehow better than everyone else. In some senses they were right. By any objective measure I had been gifted with more than my fair share of musical, mathematical and literary talent for which I could claim no intentional merit. I hadn’t earned those gifts and I knew it. My peers were missing the fact that much of my bravado was compensation for low self-esteem. Further, my parents brought up the concept of ‘noblesse oblige’ with some frequency. I had been born into privilege and I would carry an obligation to give back all my life. They also demanded that I “carry myself” like the aristocrat I was supposed to be. It was 30 years before I learned enough about body language to stop striding into a room as if I owned it with a haughty expression on my face. And you’re reading this because I’ve given up secrets.
I was born in 1945. I tried writing a diary when I was 7 and then again when I was 10. I thought it was what girls did but I couldn’t get into it. Maybe I was too busy living to reflect on what was happening or why. But by halfway through my 15th year the questioning had started in ernest. I’m sure I talked things over with my friends but that wasn’t enough. I know my mother wanted access to my inner life. We spent hours discussing current events, whether either of us would be able to shoot a neighbor breaking into our bomb shelter (actually, we didn’t have one), what had happened to our “beautiful relationship” (the one we had when I was a child who worshipped her and didn’t question her decisions), the meaning of life in general. By 15, sharing my inner life with my mother had begun to feel invasive. Besides, I already knew what she thought and I wanted more. So I got an extra spiral-bound notebook and began sharing with myself.
Today, June 1, 2019 (It happens to be my mother’s birthday, or would be if she was still alive) I’m going to begin Journaling 2.0 – Reflections on Reflections. I’ve kept all those old notebooks. Each time I return to them I’m amazed at how little I’ve changed. That doesn’t mean there’s been no change, but it’s clear that, at age 74, I’m the same person with many of the same unanswered questions. As you’ll see on the next page, I began with the sentence:
“Possibly if I write down my thoughts, the one’s worth thinking will not be forgotten.”
The years have taught me at least two things. First, that writing down thoughts in a private journal will not preserve them. I will die, the notebook is likely to be thrown out unread, my memory will go with me. That’s forgetting. But if I share what I’ve written, publish it, there’s some chance the wish embedded in my sentence could come true.
Second, there’s no a priori way to judge which thoughts will have value, “be worth thinking”, beyond the simple joy of having them. There’s a kind of natural selection for ideas as well as genes that happens over time. Genes are lost by being bred out of the gene pool. Thoughts just get forgotten. Publishing thoughts may be like the strategy in nature of an individual laying 10,000 eggs each season even though only 2 or 3 of them are likely to survive to produce the next generation. Perhaps I can push this metaphor a little further. Most of those eggs get eaten by other species. Their specific genes are digested, destroyed, not passed on. Still, the eggs have served a purpose. They have nurtured someone else. Maybe thoughts really are like eggs…
My juvenile notes are interesting to me, in part because I can compare them to what I think now as I read them. I’ve chosen a strategy make them interesting to you by adding my “mature” reaction to each journal entry. You might want to do the same and pass the result on.
One more lesson I hadn’t learned at 15. There’s a certain value in simply amusing each other. My mother used to repeat, “Fools names and fools faces are always found in public places.” I interpreted this to mean I shouldn’t carve my initials in tree trunks or paint them on mountain tops. Those who did were fools. I also believed, on a deeper level, that I shouldn’t talk about myself. So I kept this journal secret. Experience has taught me otherwise. People enjoy stories, the more personal the better. So, dear reader, even if you find no profound ideas in the words that follow, I hope you enjoy the story.
