Sunday, June 18, 2006
Volumes and Volumes and Volumes of ME....
..have been my pre-occupation over these last two days...or at least, READING the journalling I have done over these past 40 years! Yes!!!! 40 YEARS!...I started my first journal when I was 16 or 17 and have written of my life in small blank books ever since! At some point, years ago, I had a piece of furniture made to store all the journal volumes in, so they at least could be all together and make some sort of their own sense.....yesterday, I opened some of those drawers (which I have not opened in years) and started taking out individual volumes and reading back through the years......it is like I have been on a tour of an entire other continent...I am amazed at not only what i wrote, but how I wrote it....the topics are limitless, the styles varying along with my handwriting, but all in all, a compelling narrative.
So much to be done with it all, as my years of diary-keeping include not only personal highways and byways, but professional ones as well...the sections on the Boston putting together of RAGS, for example.... practically publishable...in fact, I may ask if that particular bunch of entries might not be of interest to BACKSTAGE, when it comes time for me to write a column or two...I wrote down everything we were all going through as we torturously made our way through rehearsal and preview days in Boston, then NYC....wow. I mean I wrote down EVERYTHING! And since I was the Principal Equity Deputy, I had several points of view on all the issues that arose during that truly troubled time....all the major players come under the scrutiny of my busy writer's eye, and my pen spared no one!
But that is only a tiny section of what has turned into a vast work of my life!
Here, for example, is what I wrote one day in 1999, while I was visiting Peter at a show he was doing at the Jersey Shore, and my darling Momma was coming to her final days in Chicago...I had been visiting her, helping her, for two weeks out of every month at that point...here's something I wrote:
"So, I do what I can...My Momma, as she decays and leaves this life, drifts up from wherever she daily dwells, and looks at me and tells me how much she loves me, and how brave and good a daughter I am being.....she totally acknowledges me, and I watch her refine and refine, until a bare essence of who she is remains....
A flame burns truly inside older people - if you can get past the debris of aging - the flame is there to behold and be warmed by....these people, bent by time and illness,have been there, seen it, done it all before us - their flames can be beacons if we want them to be - They have forgoten more about life, these old ones,than I have yet to learn."
Then I go on to tell a story about a woman in Momma's nursing home named Adelaide, who had lost her every-day mind, but, having once been a concert pianist, one day sat down at a piano while I was there, and gave Momma and me a concert from the depths of her lost memories..I sang with her...we all three cried...no one else shared this but the three of us...we were in the basement rec room...ono one else around. I will never forget my Momma's eyes that afternoon...
My journals are so filled with life...I wonder what i shall do with it all.
So much to be done with it all, as my years of diary-keeping include not only personal highways and byways, but professional ones as well...the sections on the Boston putting together of RAGS, for example.... practically publishable...in fact, I may ask if that particular bunch of entries might not be of interest to BACKSTAGE, when it comes time for me to write a column or two...I wrote down everything we were all going through as we torturously made our way through rehearsal and preview days in Boston, then NYC....wow. I mean I wrote down EVERYTHING! And since I was the Principal Equity Deputy, I had several points of view on all the issues that arose during that truly troubled time....all the major players come under the scrutiny of my busy writer's eye, and my pen spared no one!
But that is only a tiny section of what has turned into a vast work of my life!
Here, for example, is what I wrote one day in 1999, while I was visiting Peter at a show he was doing at the Jersey Shore, and my darling Momma was coming to her final days in Chicago...I had been visiting her, helping her, for two weeks out of every month at that point...here's something I wrote:
"So, I do what I can...My Momma, as she decays and leaves this life, drifts up from wherever she daily dwells, and looks at me and tells me how much she loves me, and how brave and good a daughter I am being.....she totally acknowledges me, and I watch her refine and refine, until a bare essence of who she is remains....
A flame burns truly inside older people - if you can get past the debris of aging - the flame is there to behold and be warmed by....these people, bent by time and illness,have been there, seen it, done it all before us - their flames can be beacons if we want them to be - They have forgoten more about life, these old ones,than I have yet to learn."
Then I go on to tell a story about a woman in Momma's nursing home named Adelaide, who had lost her every-day mind, but, having once been a concert pianist, one day sat down at a piano while I was there, and gave Momma and me a concert from the depths of her lost memories..I sang with her...we all three cried...no one else shared this but the three of us...we were in the basement rec room...ono one else around. I will never forget my Momma's eyes that afternoon...
My journals are so filled with life...I wonder what i shall do with it all.
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