My name is Jeanette. I am starting this journal at the end of August. I don’t know why I waited until the end of the summer. The heat we so longed for in June and July, has finally begun in earnest and we are all sweating it out. Everyone has a summer mindset and school starts in a week!
This journal is not my first one. I started journaling when I was twelve years old, so perhaps one can imagine how many burgeoning boxes and drawers of these things I collected over time. The first journal, given to me on my 12th birthday, was a burgundy hardcover with gold embossed print on the cover. I took that one to Europe in the summer of 1976. I used a pencil for quite a bit of my writing and now certain pages are difficult to read.
We missed the bicentennial celebration that summer and I have always thought that was just plain old bad planning. We spent July 4th in a hotel room in France and I wrote about missing that great national shindig as I sat on the bed in the room watching French television. I remember that by the end of our trip, we as a family made up our minds about the French. We did not like them.
I still laugh when I remember the joke I heard years later about going to war with the French. It went something like this. “Forgetting to take the French to war (as an ally) is similar to forgetting to take one’s accordion to war”. My father in particular was greatly amused by the joke. He experienced the brunt of French abuse during the trip because he paid the bills and spoke to cranky hotel managers when he could not understand them and they could not understand him.
But that was all so long ago and now I have a new journal and I think I may even feel slightly different about the French. Maybe. This journal is beige Spanish leather with a lovely raised pattern swirling all over it. It doesn’t close like a regular book. The two flaps tuck together and the one flap has a long attached leather string like a shoe lace. Once the flaps are folded over each other, the lace wraps all around the book and it can be tied shut. It looks like a neat and beautiful package all ready to be dropped in the post.
I love opening the first page of a journal. The empty pages beg to be filled and I always feel I get to start afresh. I start new journals on my birthday, New Year’s Day, Easter Sunday, at the beginning of a new month and often on a Monday; whichever date makes me feel the best.
School starts in a week and I suspect that the new year will once again fill up with all the things which make us crazy. Our school district is like a police officer running pell-mell past the bank robbery to catch somebody who is jay walking. After twenty years, I should know.
I would like this year to be different. I don’t think that the district will change. I want to change. So, I am writing in another journal because I want to become an agent. I want to be an agent of information; someone who writes about joy and pathos, change and consistency, truth and deception, distrust and hope. I want to find that brownie on the bookshelf; that unexpected pocket of joy. I would also like to point out that pedestrian walkways in the middle of a busy street are not a good idea. Depending on the mercy of others, a single plastic sign, painted lines on the road and ineffectual laws, while observing the general condition of humanity is just plain dumb. There. That’s all I have for today, dear Journal. Careful crossing Main Street!
690 Saint Paul 