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Illustration by Catherine Chan
“You can read them when I’m dead! Then burn them. But don’t get your hopes up. You’ll be bored out of your mind!” declared my 92-year-old mother, a dedicated diarist, who had been keeping a record of her life for more than 75 years.
Admittedly, the odds of uncovering spicy content penned by the prim and proper daughter of a Presbyterian minister seemed low. Despite a process so private that her three boys had never witnessed a diary entry, our mother assured us that only facts were recorded. No cutting remarks or rants. No starry-eyed confessions of celebrity crushes.
Casually shared content did little to titillate. “Your older brother and family moved to Brantford 10 years ago today.” “Your younger brother and spouse are hosting Christmas for the third year in a row.” “You and Cheryl have come to play bridge on New Year’s Eve eight years in a row.”
It took years, but one day I realized that my dad had become my best friend
Things changed in late 2020 when I moved to England. FaceTime replaced phone calls. Leery of video conversations, I got the privilege of staring at my mom’s foot each week as she sat cross-legged in her recliner, iPad on her lap. Pandemic isolation increased our call frequency and Mom eventually warmed up to reversing the camera so we could chat face-to-face. When the blandness of her diarizing came up one call, I went on the attack. “If they’re so boring then read me some to help cure my insomnia,” I challenged. Much to my surprise, my mother agreed to a diary reading for the next day.
My confident exterior belied a tinge of panic as to what I’d gotten us into. What if the content really was a giant snooze fest? Could I feign excitement over a pepperoni pizza ordered on April 5, 1972? I decided to improve the odds by suggesting we start with the most important year of my mother’s life – the year I was born. (Once a middle child, always a middle child.) The session would be video-recorded, if nothing more than to prove to my siblings that it had occurred. The next day, technology activated, our session began. Mom opened a small, red, softcover journal and began “Jan. 1, 1957.” Six entries and 45-minutes later, we said goodbye and my head almost exploded. I had struck gold. These two-to-three-line entries were trigger points for a torrent of memories that came flooding back. The scene had to be set, characters amply described and the outcomes fully explored. I barely slept that night.
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We moved quickly to four 90-minute sessions a week as we plowed through 1957. Births, illnesses, bridge parties, winter storms. Moves. Neighbours who didn’t return things. Friends that drank too much. Entries penned two to six times a week captured the life of a young veterinarian and his stay-at-home wife living in small-town Saskatchewan. The ordinary becomes extraordinary when it is your life, your family’s life, recounted on a daily basis.
As we closed out 1957 with the young couple now blessed by my existence, we agreed that our “Diaries Project” should move to the “beginning of time” when a 14-year-old girl sat down to write her first entry. If 1957 was gold, then 1942 was platinum! Life as a young teen in small-town Ontario sprung from the brittle pages of a bottle-green diary. Boys walking her home from dances. Bike rides to swimming holes. Jitterbug parties. Babysitting the Anglican minister’s seven children for 50 cents. Sending care packages to her brothers serving in the war. A dreary summer job at the woollen mill. Tragedies – losing a girlfriend to cancer, a friend’s father dying of a heart attack at 47 (not uncommon back then). A death by suicide.
A hike on an ancient pilgrimage route in Japan reminded me to open my heart
I had discovered time travel. Weekday afternoons I was transported back to the 1940s, then 50s, 60s and so on to experience the daily goings on of my mother’s life and the people in it.
Whenever we went too far down a rabbit hole, mom would exclaim, “We have seven decades to cover with who knows how much time left, we’d better get on with it!” As if to reinforce the uncertainty, a year into our adventure her eyesight began failing and it became my responsibility to read. I was entrusted with the sacred journals – 16 lock & key five-year diaries of assorted sizes and colours.
Over a three-year period, we covered her life as a teenager, young adult, mother, working woman, divorcee, grandmother, retiree, great grandmother. Too precious not to share, we produced two interactive, multimedia Gramma Diary Zoom sessions for her nine adult grandchildren (and their parents).
And then she was gone. The voice behind almost 20,000 diary entries fell silent. We were eight years short of the present. But I was okay with that. I was in no hurry to get to a diary page with “The End” written on it.
Printed on the title page of that first diary purchased back in March of 1942 was the following:
A line each day, whether it be of the weather or of more important substances, will in time to come, bring back those vague memories, worth remembering, to almost actual reality.
Truer words were never printed.
Howard Gaskin lives in Toronto.
