Blank Book

I went to the stationery store today to buy an unlined, blank book. I hoped there would be a wide selection so that I could find one with a cover that gave me aesthetic satisfaction as well as moral courage. In fact, there was only one in the entire store that spoke to me. It was soft and deep purple, the color of the wine grapes Frank stomped on as a child. I needed this book because I’ve decided to embark on the practice of journaling beginning on August 2nd, my 79th birthday. This will not primarily be journaling in the sense of keeping an account of my interior monologue, although there may be some of that. It will be an exercise in numbering the days. At this point, the number seems like something I can visualize, even though I of course don’t know what it is. It is not infinite in any case, the way it used to be. 3000 would be nice. 4000 would be nicer.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I imagine the entries to follow the format of the 19th century diaries I often ran across when I was an archivist. “July 27th, a Saturday. Blistering heat. The nectarines are sweet and juicy as are, so they tell me, the peaches, but I don’t eat peaches. Can’t abide the fuzz.” The greatest difficulty I anticipate is the problem of my handwriting which is awful. When I was in grade school in the fifties, they still taught penmanship. It seems so antiquated now. Up above the blackboard, there was a banner along the length of the room that displayed the upper and lower case alphabet in cursive. Oh those capital Gs. They looked like ships sailing into a high wind. Some length of time each day was spent practicing the letters. Both of my parents, who had learned Spencerian script during the First World War, held their fountain pens with their thumbs and two adjacent fingers pinched at the top, dipping them carefully into the inkwell. Both of them had graceful, flowing handwriting. But I refused to learn. I insisted on an awkward clawlike clutch of the postwar ballpoint Paper Mate. This posture resulted in crabbed writing and considerable pain, long before anyone had ever heard of carpal tunnel. I preferred not to hold the pen the way everyone else did. It was an act of defiance. 

Every time we decide, willfully, to be different, it is liberating but there are consequences. When my book, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, came out in 2019, people asked me to sign their books and sometimes to write something personal on the half-title. The results were not beautiful. I sometimes felt like I was defacing the pristine pages with my ragged scrawl. Still, it was, remarkably, my book. My language, my syntax extending into the universe. The physical surface of the book, like my imperfect appearance, my unruly hair, would have to be accepted as a minor feature of my personhood. Impermanent, undependable, not what makes me who I think I am. 

Now, I’m creating a book just for myself, to keep a record of my remaining time in this dispensation, to number my days. It feels wonderfully self-affirming to make something that isn’t called upon to be pretty or to enhance my writerly reputation, that’s nothing more than an account book of blessing. It will be a response to Psalm 90, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” And to the elaboration of “heart of wisdom” in Psalm 118,  Zeh ha-yom asah adonai. Nagilah v’nism’chah bo. “This is the day that God made. Rejoice and be glad in it.” In the Tradition, the Psalms are read between the time of death and the time of burial, but it probably doesn’t hurt to jump start the recitation. There will be days when I wake up irritable after a poor night’s sleep or a night of menacing dreams. I’m walking down Broadway barefoot. Someone is following me in the shadows. There will be days when I’m disturbed by an interaction with a friend, a worry about a family member. There will be days when the suffering of the world threatens to swamp me. But these will still be days when the sun rises in the east and shines on me from bright or overcast skies. It still shines on me in all my frailty and while it does, these days deserve my notice and that is why I bought the blank book

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In August, just in time for the end of summer, Toronto writer Paula Halpin will return with her evocative essay, Time and Tide. All subscribers are now welcome to read and comment on Many Voices posts.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.