Dear Diary? Oh, Dear...

I am of two minds about what to do with my childhood diaries.

Put them away in a remote but not inaccessible place, where from time to time I can take them out to relive those halcyon days of youth, and contemplate their value as an early portent of my career in writing.

Or...

Burn 'em, bury 'em, maybe both, and be spared the embarrassment and self-consciousness they incite in me.

Our childhood diaries are often the textual equivalent of regrettable hairstyle and wardrobe choices from bygone eras (leisure suits? 1970s designer overalls? Speedos?), the home movies/videos in which we attempted to sing popular songs, tried performing a popular dance move or acting out a movie scene, did armpit farts or, Lord help us, mooned the camera. Was I really that stupid? That clueless? That un-self-aware? we ask ourselves. That young?

Why do we keep ("keep" in both the sense of "maintain" and "hold onto") diaries and journals anyway ? A rhetorical question, obviously. There are many reasons. The earliest known diary dates back to 2500 BC, kept by an Egyptian official named Merer to document the transportation of limestone for the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (yes, I looked it up on the Internet because why wouldn't I?) Down through time, people have used the diary/journal format to capture history taking place around them, to keep a bare-bones record of daily or weekly occurrences, and of course, to share innermost feelings about life, love, family, politics, sex and whatever else makes up the human experience.

Over the years, I've wondered: When we keep a diary, whatever the format or style, do we actually mean for it to be a personal, and confidential, task? Are we really just writing for ourselves? Or, at some level, do we imagine that down the line, somebody -- family member, lover, spouse, friend, complete stranger (maybe even a psychiatrist or a police investigator) -- is going to read it? And does that influence what and how we write? Anne Frank, from what we know, wrote her diary with the hope that it would be seen by others. She made edits and revisions along the way, whether to make the narrative more cohesive or, in some cases, to soften what she considered harsh, overly critical or judgmental passages. (Of course, her father subsequently made some deletions or other changes to the text before publishing it, although in some cases this entailed reinserting material Anne had previously edited out.)

My novel, Transformation Summer, is a coming-of-age memoir narrated in first-person by Seth, focused on a two-week experience when he was 16 that, years later, he's still processing. So who is Seth writing for? I think the answer is obvious: He's writing for himself, as if by once again going through the events and episodes of that period, he'll find some sort of resolution.

But of course a memoir is different than a diary or journal, because with the latter we're without benefit of hindsight or resolution. We just keep writing, until we don't.

I hadn't expected to see these diaries again: For decades, I was under the impression that my mother had thrown them out. Then one day, a year or so ago, I was cleaning out her house and there they were, tucked away with some other memorabilia in a shoe box inside a closet. I brought them home and, in the months since, I've periodically perused these back pages.

I can point to two books in the diary structure I read as a kid that made an impression on me: There was Anne Frank, of course, and Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, which I first encountered in its short-story form for English class, and later read as a novel on my own. If I were to retroactively self-analyze myself at that age, I'd say I liked how, as the reader, you could experience the accumulation of time and events -- and the protagonist's reaction to them -- right along with the diarist. Pretty cool.

Still, it's not like I'd ever expressed a desire for a diary. But because the first two journals I kept had been gifts -- I think from my father -- I guess I felt obliged to at least give it a shot. My initial foray at age 11, which was in a "page-a-day" format, lasted not quite two months; I tried again about a year later, and quit after less than two weeks.

The second diary was in the "five-year" format: each page was divided into five sections, the idea being that as you filled in your entry for a day you could see what you'd written in previous years. I picked up roughly where I'd left off from my first diary but only for about two-and-a-half weeks. Two years later, though, during eighth grade, I went all in and was a faithful daily diarist for three solid years.

The thing about the five-year diary, though, was that you didn't exactly have a lot of space to work with: Each section was roughly an inch high and three inches wide, so it was nigh impossible to do much in the way of reflecting or ruminating. So maybe I took it as a challenge, to cram in as much content as I could. Maybe I thought it would be enlightening to see, over time, the accumulation and progression of experiences, memories and events that I deemed significant at the time to record.

Or, I don't know, it was just something to do.

I had litte difficulty filling up those 1"x3" spaces, and in fact I often had to write at a practically microscopic size, or use random abbreviations, just to fit everything in.

So, you may ask with understandable impatience, what did I write about? Let me break it down for you:

•Football: Thanks to my Dad, who played at Penn State in the 1950s, I grew up a voracious football fan and from September to about mid-January I followed both college and pro versions assiduously. If Penn State, Harvard, the Steelers, the Colts (then still in Baltimore) and Patriots won, it was one damn good weekend.

•Weather: Specifically, winter. I don't know why -- maybe it was because I spent a goodly part of my childhood in Vermont -- but growing up I felt that snowfall should be oft-occurring and abundant. So residing in a part of New York State that was often on the borderline between rain and snow could often create equal parts anticipation and frustration, both of which I expressed with great fervor.

•Girls: Oh, Lord. If you had two X chromosomes, were my age or reasonably near it, and you so much as said as "Hi" to me, you probably wound up in my diary. And if we engaged in conversation, well, we were on the verge of betrothal. ironically, midway through eighth grade, Esmerelda Cantovin (not her real name) unilaterally declared that we were a couple, a pairing that lasted about three-and-a-half weeks).

There were other things I wrote about, hardly surprising for a kid my age: TV shows I followed, movies I went to, record albums I bought, books I read. School (that is, school-related happenings besides interactions with girls). Get-togethers with friends. Occasional if very brief comments on important national or international events, like the massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics or Nixon's resignation.

One of the things that jumps out at me about this diary is the fairly regular use of exclamations -- not only your basic "Wow!" but "Zounds!" or "Egad!" Oh, come on, I think when I come upon these, please tell me I didn't really use those words in everyday conversation. There's also a fair amount of informal contractions: "gonna," "nothin'," "comin'," "goin'." Who was I trying to impress? I wonder. Apparently just myself.

My last diary, which lasted from the middle of 11th grade through the end of my freshman year in college, was a small spiral notebook that I repurposed after having used it for a school-related project. I was no longer confined to a small space or a single page, and at times I wrote pretty lengthy entries. Yes, I still reported on football and weather, and to some extent on girls: By then, however, I had a girlfriend (albeit at a significant distance), so I wasn't quite as overstimulated by the social milieu; plus, I was simply more mature, I guess.

But I wasn't as disciplined as I'd been in the five-year-diary era. I'd go days, sometimes weeks, between entries. Finally, I just put the notebook-diary aside and never picked it up again, and it wound up ensconced in my bedroom closet at home, along with my Marvel comics and MAD magazines.

Taken together, my childhood diaries -- cringe-inducing entries aside -- are largely just a chronicle of happenings, and a rather repetitive one at that, with very little introspection or dissection. Yet it's useful because it provides what I take to be a reliable timeline of events which has served to correct my memory: For example, my courtship with the aforementioned Esmerelda Cantovin -- not her real name -- actually lasted longer than I previously recalled.

More importantly, there were some significant family-related developments during these years, which I couldn't precisely date in my memory until I came upon them in the diary. What's striking is how these events, as presented in the diary, simply happen, with little or no foreshadowing in earlier entries that might lend context nor much in the way of subsequent explanation or analysis. Again, given the five-year diary format, there was precious little space for that, but it's very possible I didn't think of writing about such things. Or I simply didn't want to.

In fact, even in the last journal, I know I deliberately left out some important details of certain events. What's more, like Anne Frank (this is the only legitimate parallel between us), I returned to a few entries and scratched out a sentence here and there. Perhaps in some way I was trying to protect myself from uncomfortable or painful feelings, but that explanation seems pretty ridiculous: Even if I didn't include this or that detail, it wasn't as if I had banished it from memory; nor did blotting out something mean I wouldn't remember having written it.

It's also possible that -- to revisit what I said earlier -- I had this vague knife-edge of uncertainty as to whether what I wrote would stay private, that somebody else would read it. Would doing so change what that person thought of me? Guess I didn't want to take the chance.

So, did all this help point me toward a career in writing? Maybe. I think that the five-year diary in particular helped instill in me the idea that, as a journalist, you have a space to fill at a regular interval -- every day or every week or whatever the publication schedule might be. I suppose that, like a journalist, I had my beats, only in this case it was my own interests, activities and whims. I got used to the idea of reflecting, distilling and then writing, even if it was only to fill a 1"x3" space. Of course, I didn't have any editorial standards to live up to except mine, such as they were.

OK, so I guess I won't destroy the diaries, at least not yet. There's all the personal and familial history in those pages, as I said, and the Young Sean Unfiltered aspect is endearing, sorta. Just don't say anything to Esmerelda Cantovin (not her real name) -- wherever she is.

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