I just finished reading an historical bibliography where much of the information about the person came from letters or diaries. And it got me thinking about what of ourselves we leave behind. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when my mother's parents had retired from here in the NYC area to live in Florida and long distance calls were pretty expensive, we used to write letters quite often (both my grandfather and mother were teachers and she wanted us to get used to writing and he wanted us to get used to writing correctly; it was not uncommon for my grandfather to mark my letters up). Most of those letters have been lost to time but, recently, while shifting through some old pictures in a box, a type-written letter from my grandmother (she was a typist) fell to the floor. It was from around 1980, when I was 12. It was definitely a running correspondence as indicated by her and my grandfather's comments. I even remembered some of it. It was a blast from the past of things from my childhood I had forgotten. My grandparents are long gone now and, as happens with time, the memory of them has faded. However, that letter brought them back, much, as I suppose, the letters used in the biography I just completed bought those long dead people back to life.
Well, I haven't written a letter by hand in many years, outside of business correspondence, which is usually quite dry and, while do write emails or IMs, most of them have been lost to the cyber world. I have kept a journal on and off over the years, usually just to write my thoughts of a special occasion or to clarify something that is bothering me (I find writing to be relaxing), it is barely touched these days and even then it only contains sporadic information, nothing on my day to day thoughts. As I looked at the letter and thought of the lack of record of my life, I wondered how much of me will be forgotten by my children. However, what I do do is either write comments on articles on various websites that invite feedback, or I blog.
The blogging and entries on various websites, I do has become my defacto diary. I write about daily events going on in thee world today or, depending on what page I'm on, reminese on the past. An example is Facebook. On Facebook, I've gotten back in touch with many childhood friends I grew up with. Some of these friends have created Facebook groups based on our high school graduating class (we're having a 22nd virtual reunion at the moment) and others have created pages based on our childhood neighborhood. Recently, I responded to a question on the neighborhood page about what I remember from our youth. Talk about memories. Memories that are falling away through time. Fortunately I started keeping a diary around then and while most of it is mundane, such as whether the Mets won or what the weather was, there some interesting tidbits about places and people long lost to my past.
I grew up in Howard Beach, Queens in NYC, Howard Beach is well known for it's pizza, low crime and tolerance of all ethnicities (click on the links and you will see my sarcastic side). I grew up in the 1970s and had a great time. As I typed my response and thought of many childhood, I thought of my own children's childhoods.
I live in the suburbs now and it depresses me my children won't have the same experiences I had. We walked to our elementary school and were let out by ourselves for lunch to wander over to the shopping center across the street from our school for pizza (2 slices and a soda for $1) then head to the candy store for comics or, of course, candy or flip baseball cards in front of a blank wall that was part of the supermarket before headed back to school when lunch ended.
No one thought it was strange for 7, 8, 9 year old children to leave school for lunch. No one worried that something other then a fight might happen. Sane for after school. The bell rang and we were free to go (the teachers walked us to the exits in elementary school). No problems if you went to someone else's house after school at the spur of the moment, you just walked home.
I remember doing all this at age 8. Well my eldest is now that age and some of what we did is impossible for him to do (fewer sidewalks, longer distances, bused everywhere) or would be considered child endangerment (in my town, even children who live just blocks from the elementary school, like I do, are not allowed to walk to/from school by themselves). Children are not allowed out for lunch, not that they could go anywhere. On the plus side, it is nice having grass in the school yard in lieu of asphalt (though asphalt made it easier to play punch ball). I also like having more than a few baseball/soccer fields for the kids. But they are not going to have the joy of hitting a homerun over the main chapel of our temple onto 90th Street.
Other than that, I miss some of the smaller, unique places that no longer exist; places called the Big Bow Wow, Pizza City, Happy's Deli, the bakery where my dad used to get me a sprinkled cookie early in the morning if I accompanied him on my trike while he walked the dog there to get some coffee (and let the dog do her business on sh-- err, poop row), the Kiddie Park on Crossbay Bvld etc but those places are going away no matter where you live. In the area I live now, an old ice cream place that has been around for 50 or 60 years will close soon as the owners are ready to retire and it doesn't make financial sense for someone else to keep the place going, though I suppose my son will remember the place like I remember the places of my youth (our daughter is too young to remember). At least I still have several kosher delis to go to when the mood strikes.
I also miss the Christmas lights from my youth. In Howard Beach many of the families put up incredible, detailed displays, especially for those days. There are plenty in my current neighborhood, but the houses are further apart than in Queens so we don't get that "wow" factor you'd get riding up and down the streets in December from having so many houses so close together with their displays.
Anyway, as I typed all this into the remember page on Facebook, I realized these blog entries are my diary. It is where I write my thoughts on past and present events. So what I decided to start doing is save all these entries to my computer's hard drive and print out a hard copy to store away for the future so that one day my children will have the same joy I had recently when, while unpacking a box, that from letter my grandparents, gone over 20 years, wrote to me over a quarter of century ago floated out and brought me back home to my childhood.
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