Dear Diary

I listened to part of Prairie Home Companion today, a rebroadcast celebrating spring. I suspect that it might have been a show put together from pieces of other shows, rather than a regular rerun, because Garrison Keillor never announced the original broadcast date. One of the sections was a singer named Sally Dworsky reading from the diary of Mary Theresa Hill, the wife of railroad magnate James J. Hill, about the family's trip to Paris in the spring of 1900. Ms. Dworsky sang some of the sections from which she was reading, like one about "Papa" and their daughters going to the flower market - lovely because it wasn't a song with rhyme and meter, just simple description and music.


I was listening to this diary being read on "PHC" and found myself thinking about Mrs. Hill and her record of every day goings-on, like taking a carriage to Versailles and attending a formal but "quite pleasant" dinner party. I don't imagine that she was writing for posterity, but here were her words about a bothersome cough being read on the radio (a very, very new invention at the time), over 100 years later. She may have been writing to keep a record to tell her friends at home, or just to express herself honestly at a time when she probably wasn't able to do so with other people.


When I was in fifth grade I read Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh and Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl (both, incidentally, banned at different times). I may have been an impressionable ten year old but those books have had a lifelong influence on me: I started keeping a journal, generally in black-speckled comp books like Harriet uses.


I think I had an idea that someone might read them in forty years and find out how a girl grew up in the 1980s... though I didn't report that much on my neighbors like Harriet and as it's turned out so far I haven't lived through "history being made" like Anne did. I probably also thought that I could later mine the notebooks for characters, plots, and what I later learned is called "an honest voice" whenever I started writing novels. Which was Harriet's plan, too.