Dear Diary

  

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Dear Diary,

 

I can’t believe it’s been 56 years since I’ve written in you!!!! Wow!!! I’ve been a little busy, but that’s NO excuse!! Thank you for patiently waiting for me to finally find the tiny gold key that unlocks your pink-lined pages, and the pen with the purple ink I always used for my notes to you.

I confess that I gave you no thought over the decades, but that neglect ends NOW. I can’t wait to tell you all about my secret crush on Bobby Sherman and the white Slicker lipstick I bought with my babysitting money (Dad said I looked like I swallowed Maalox. Hahaha Dad NOT funny) and the time that mean girl Peggy C. made me cry at the big sleepover. Oh, and my wedding and our five kids and my three careers--them too. 

 

But, Diary? I have to mea culpa…I cheated on you, and not just once!

 

You see, after I lost you, I bought and wrote in LOTS of other journals. When I was in high school, I decided to keep a diary just like Samuel Pepys, the famous British diarist of the 1650’s, because I was a literary snob in those days. Every entry would end, “and so to bed!” because that’s what Sam would write.

Later, when Steve (my husband--he’s even cuter than Bobby Sherman!) and I were on the road traveling with children’s theatre (yes! Dear Diary! I can drive a car now!) I wrote an entry every single day for two years. Some of it is interesting, like our weekends in Toronto and Montreal and Vermont and Boston, but a lot of it is super boring because I wrote down every show we performed in every school and town. If you ever want to know the name of the school in Boltons Landing, NY where they gave us coffee that had been made three days earlier (yuck!!!!!) well, it’s in there!

 

Then, when our children were born, I bought a journal for each one of them (or really for me to write to each one of them). I learned a couple of important things about myself Dear D: I hate writing by hand, so it’s all chicken scratch I can’t even read AND I always start strong and peter out (each journal ended for good when the kid was about seven). 

 

For about 20 years I’d fill in those little Hallmark date books, but that routine ended in the mid 1990s.

 

Since then, I only keep a journal when we travel, and that is on the computer. My other life is a great big question mark because all I have to go on is my daily work planner, and that doesn’t tell me much.

 

But it’s all going to change now, my cheap plastic friend! I will pick up where I left off, starting tomorrow! And I’ll tell you all my secrets, and keep you locked up and NOT lose the key this time!

 

TTYL, Diary!

 

Love ya, 

Elise

So...Volume V? Really????