Note: this is written for our esteemed colleague formerlurker; one hopes she finds it interesting.
Every year at this time, I am compelled to pause and think about someone.
This is intended to be a companion-piece to "Christmas journey, with detour," posted here this same time last year.
http://www.conservativecave.com/index.php/topic,37782.0
memories of a younger brother. My younger brother kept what was, apparently, a diary, seven thick spiral notebooks in which he recorded his observations from his 14th birthday until three days before his death at the age of 17.
It was a surprise to me, when such things were delivered to me, as holder of the family archives. My younger brother, an assiduously dutiful child, had of course from a young age written letters and somesuch, just as my parents and all the older brothers and sisters had, but he never seemed as enthusiastic about it as the rest of us had been.
Everyone else was always writing, writing, writing, writing at the tip of a hat.
He however usually had to be prodded.
I was at the time taking care of a house where the owners had gone on a two-month trip to east Africa--it was cheaper to hire me to live in a place, than to board out the dog and the cat, and it didn't upset the dog and the cat so much--one of those mansions in an affluent area of Lincoln.
It was a winter afternoon, and after realizing what I had been given, I hastily shut the book I had opened, and consigned all seven spiral notebooks to the flames in the fireplace, unread.
It was not that there was likely to be something unpleasant in them; it was simply a respect for my late younger brother; some things are meant for only an individual soul and God to know.
I had done the same, other years, when receiving collections for the family archives, destroying unread what were obviously love-letters between the parents, and between the brothers and sisters and their own spouses, and personal diaries (but not journals, whose intent was different).
For this, I was occasionally criticized, as if destroying history, or trying to "hide" something, blot it out.
Which to me seemed an inaccurate criticism; after all, I kept all else of the family archives, in which there were inevitably some unpleasant things.....provided their original intent was not to be deeply personal, for eyes other than just those of God.
Despite that I've destroyed bales of paper, I've never regretted it; some things are meant for only God to know.
I will start at the first of your posts.
Last year I was given the diary's of my grandmother on Moms side, years that started in nineteen 20 up to 1980.
Boxes of them some one year diary's others 5 year diary's.
There was little room to write about anything but the weather or short comments about her family. It is difficult to read some of the entries because the writer was in some sort of turmoil at the time.
My son happend upon the letters my grandfather wrote to her while he was on the Mexican Border, WW!
The love letters could only have been written by a french man, the prose and utter devotion comes through as if it were yesterday. No lover can write like the French--wonderful.
This Pep'per that helped raise me was an old man when I was born--perhaps 45 years old and I only knew him and my Me mere as old folks. Finding the life they had led when they were youngsters was a treasure for us. My son found pictures of them in the 1920's that showed them both as alive and vibrant, sometimes silly sometimes serious but they became to us real humans that we wished we had known in their time of youth.
This did not stop as 50 years later we found pictures of my grandmother beside a Cati's and my grandfathers writing below it "" MY little cati's rose.
In no way did my grandfather know that his great grand son would ever come across these letters to his be loved, 90 years later. For us who knew a much different man, these letters are priceless.
Why do people keep a journal, is it for them to read years later or for the generations to come after them.?
These journals may be hard to read in years later but they reflect the person as they were at that time, the weather, the politics of that era.
On the other hand Frank I can understand your burning the journals of your brother, unread, in your situation I believe I would have done the same.
