My Dad’s Journal

My mother has been cleaning out a lot of old papers lately. There’s actually a lot of stuff there I wanted to see… she kept her old day planners from the eighties and nineties, and there’s info about the day-to-day activities of my childhood in there I wouldn’t have otherwise. But the most interesting thing I’ve found so far is a journal my father kept as a class assignment his freshman year of college. This was back in the fall of 1960…

Of course, I had to flip to the back page and see what kind of grade he got even before I read anything else, and of course it was an A. Underneath it, the professor’s comment was (I’m paraphrasing) “Very elegantly, and sometimes beautifully written, but not much personal insight. I still don’t feel I know much about you after reading it.” And to some degree that’s true. That reluctance to expose one’s feelings is a trait that I’ve inherited from my dad, and have been actively trying to fight against most of my life. I like to think I’ve risen above it to some degree.

My mother has her own thoughts about where this comes from… she once told me the story about how, after high school graduation, my father and two of his friends exercised some of their teenage freedom and took a cross-country drive. They drove all the way from Ohio to California – no mean feat back when the national highway system was practically brand-new – and came back about three weeks later. But when he came back, no one in his family asked him how he was, or had any questions about his trip – what he saw, what he felt about it. He felt as if he had achieved something and had stories to tell, and no one was interested. My mother said that from that point, he was so disappointed that really putting forth the effort to communicate wasn’t worth it. Or maybe it just exacerbated his usual tendencies. His college journal would have been written that very fall, mere months after that event.

In addition to this, as my father has gotten older and his multiple sclerosis has taken deeper hold, he’s had a whole other wall that has been erected around his psyche. This time, it’s part of his disease… one of the traits MS has in common with Alzheimer’s is the creation of “plaques” in the brain, which are small areas that have essentially hardened and aren’t usable anymore. Recently, this has been a little more evident in my dad… my wife says that once when she was visiting my parents she found him staring into the upper corner of a room until he was called out of it. Once he phoned me saying he wasn’t able to use the TV remote, and no amount of my talking him through it could get any results. From his comments and the sounds I heard, I think he might have been holding the other phone extension instead of the remote.

Being so familiar with what my dad is like today, I felt compelled to sit down and read about he was like back fifty years ago, when he was 18. My first impression of the journal was its physical appearance -- his handwriting is so tiny and neat. He wrote in cursive, so cleanly and uniformly that it almost looks like a printed font. It’s a mile away from today, when his hands are too numb to hold a pen for any length of time, the letters huge and scrawled. Even when I was small, his handwriting was already larger and shakier than it was in college. And his choice of words are slightly flowery, just the way I remember him speaking when I was little.

The content of the entries themselves aren’t too remarkable for the most part – it really does seem like what a teenager would write about to make an English professor take note: evocative phrases about the weather, stuff he did over the weekend, etc. But I can also see a few places where glimpses of his opinions do shine through. In one entry, he talks about how he never thought rock and roll would last so long (about five years at that point, I figure). He wasn’t (and never became) a fan of popular music, and hearing him call what was then modern music “artless” and full of “gimmicks” is kind of entertaining. In another, he talks about the inept tiling work on some columns in his dorm, and he puzzles over what the uneven green triangles and squares are supposed to evoke. At the end, he says that every time he walks by he’s tempted to take a chisel and tear them all off himself, so that he can do the job correctly. It reminded me that my dad was a pretty handy guy in his day – he could build theater sets, upholster furniture, and during at least one summer when I was little he spent his days painting apartments. There’s one really well-written entry where he is frustrated because some mold has grown on a piece of his mother’s pumpkin pie he had been saving. But when he takes out a magnifying glass and really takes a look at the mold, he comes to appreciate how beautiful the tiny white forest and greenish patches really are.

He does talk about his family a little too… he spends one entry marveling at his mother’s generosity and kindness. Just before this particular entry was written, he explains, one of his uncles was struck almost entirely deaf, for no apparent reason. With his wife and five kids to look after, it sounds like my grandmother helped them out, especially in terms of keeping everyone fed. He talks about how he hopes that one day he’ll be as well thought of by others as she is by members of her family. He also weighs in on JFK’s presidential election right after it happens, and while he clearly dislikes all the Nixon supporters who say that the new president is going to literally lead to the destruction of the world, he talks about feeling somewhat removed from government politics in general, and how little it appears to affect his everyday life.

I think my father, as he is today, is even more disassociated from the outside world than he was back then. Partly that’s due to his introverted inclinations, which were apparently forming even back then, and it’s partly due to his illness. Now, it seems to extend to a disassociation with himself. He just seems to go through his day, not thinking about why does the things he does, or why he feels the way he feels (if he feels anything, that is, since he doesn’t share that with the rest of us). I’ve learned to accept him as he is, but the journal entries his college professor saw as “impersonal” back then are, by comparison, some of the deepest insights into my dad that I’ve seen since I was young.