diary

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Freedom’s Just Another Word for Wearing Chambray

You can’t get more girlish than the color pink. Why do I, a woman of a certain age, now have a pink diary?

On a recent shopping trip I couldn’t resist a notebook with a suede cover. I would have preferred any other color but pink was all they had.  And I thought it might be on sale because there was no price on it. The cashier scrolled through notebook pix on her phone. “It’s $11.95. Do you still want it?”

“Yes.”

Pink was the color of my girlhood.  My mother painted my room  pink. In elementary school, she bought me a pink dress with a cape collar to wear to birthday parties. In junior high, we were mod like Twiggy but less thin.  I had a “shocking pink” mini-dress which I wore with textured over-the-knee stockings.  In the cafetorium in study hall, a fashionable mini-skirted friend confided she was having sex with a popular girl by inserting a Yardley Slicker (a Yardley brand of lipstick) into her vagina. I was cynical: I said she would get an A in English for that story.  In retrospect she was probably inspired by the Yardley ad: “Only Slickers Do It. Make you soft, wild, whatever you want to be.”

Then in high school I rebelled against pink: freedom was just another word for wearing chambray shirts and jeans. And a lesbian teacher took me out for coffee, lent me her copy of Anne Sexton’s poems, and then seduced me by sobbing about how often she had been rejected when she said she was gay. I’d rather hoped my high school crush (a boy) would seduce me, but who was I to reject her? Not only did we “wear our love like heaven” (Donovan) but “loved the one we were with” (Stephen Stills).

I’ve written elsewhere about how boring it was. I wasn’t keen on other women’s vaginas. And then there were the women’s dances, where radical lesbian feminists wore men’s suits and danced only to women’s music. Perhaps they were parodying  butch-femme roles, but it was a drab scene, even with the Supremes.  In retrospect I’m impressed with their intellect:  they were writing about feminist politics, founding various women’s centers, and experimenting with being gay.  Some went back to heterosexuality (like me), some really were gay.

By the time I was in college, I was happily heterosexual again and had a boyfriend (and then two husbands). Sometimes I wore pink t-shirts with Lee jeans, pink Oxford shirts with jean skirts, and a pink jacket.

I only have one pink shirt at the moment. And my husband will not allow me to paint any of our rooms pink.  Fortunately there are hundreds of colors at the paint store.

And now I have a pink diary!

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Bookish Posts vs. Diaries

Mom, Dad, and me.

Mom, Dad, and me (last century!)

I have written 328 posts in a year and two months.

Why put everything on the internet?

It is the fashion.  We write at Facebook or blogs.

Maybe in 10 years there will be silence.  Fashions change.

I wonder why I don’t write in a journal, but I do not.

I used to be strictly bookish, but I sometimes write diary entries. Some prefer the bookish posts, others prefer the diary.

“Best female writers?” Everybody’s there.  “Horse Races in Literature”?  Fantastic.

The most popular posts recently?    “Viragos Are Sometimes Inconsequential…” and “Library Books.”

I don’t even consider writing “real” articles or reviews.  Whatever I write is easier in a blog.

When critics find fault with blogs, they are thinking about a world of rough drafts.   It can take days, weeks, months to write a good article. Blogs are often more a collection of notes.  Often very good notes.  (I have read some excellent blogs lately.)  Journalists don’t understand bloggers’ socializing in comments and “challenges.”  Comments?  Well, why bother?  The Guardian now posts comments as articles, without, I presume, paying the commenters.

Before I move on to bookish things, I am going to write a post about my mother again.

She died last August.  I loved knowing that she was in the world, playing bridge, watching the soaps, not cooperating at the nursing home. I didn’t visited every day.  When I couldn’t bicycle, I took the bus and then called my husband for a ride home. (The neighborhood wasn’t safe after 5, or more like 3.)  I would plan to visit for one hour, and then stay till 7 p.m.  Since she wouldn’t eat the prepared food at the nursing home, I rushed out and bought hamburgers from McDonald’s; another time she resisted taking a shower for a week, and I had to convince her to go with the aide; and another time she had fallen and been left in the bathroom all night.

And this was one of the better nursing homes.

There is a lot of grief in families as one gets older.  My father wanted to visit her.  She was fascinated by him, but would have been mortified to receive him in old age.  She thought a great deal about how she looked,. She wore a wig.  She worried about the spots on her face.  You know the creams advertised on TV?  They don’t work.   If she and my father had stayed together, she would not have been in a nursing home.  That was the most exasperating thing.

My mother never remarried; my father had his pick.  I tried to straighten things out from time to time.  Utterly ridiculous.

And so another day of wondering about the past.  I really miss her.