1935. I’m stunned and my hands are as careful as they’ve ever been with any item but I still know I’m such a klutz, so they shake imperceptibly. My husband and I look at each other in amazement because she was going to be 17 that year. I read the first passage and ask: Is this the first one? Yup.  He is sure but there isn’t any: “I’ve decided to start a diary” type stuff you’d expect and I imagined her starting to write much younger.
Drobey appears immediately but he is a mystery to me, at first. From Tuesday to Sunday she goes to “The Poli” twice to see three movies: “Forsaking All Others,” “Flirtation Walk” and “Gambling.” I’m amazed when I read: “staring Clark Gable” about the first move she went to see. To be alive then!  She listens to a radio show she cannot miss, “Hollywood Hotel.” She is allowed to write a short story as her theme in English and she signs up for auditions to the school play. How hilarious, I was probably doing exactly the same things during the last few months of my sixteenth year. The two of us have more in common than either of us thought. Or maybe this is always just life, no matter who or when.  She had piano lessons with Jenette and went to the library where she met with two boys and went to watch them dance. She mentions WBZ who she writes always as initials, yes, you guessed, her crush, and of A.J.  When she began writing A.J.’s name she would write her first and last name then became first initial and last name. You may have guessed again, she is the other girl, the antagonist. I think cautiously of how to write these names because these are real people and this is from a real person’s daily record.
Drobey asks about reading her 1934 diary and I yell “Aha!” Adam, my husband, and I question whether it has fallen behind something in the closet where he found these or if maybe she did let Drobey see her diary and it was never given back. I doubt it because she writes: “I shouldn’t want him to because I was silly about him, but that’s all over now.” I think of another possibility and wonder if she destroyed the old journal. I find out Sophie – who made the appointment for her permanent on Wednesday and it came out wonderfully on Thursday, or so I am informed-is in fact the woman I’ve heard about for as long as I’ve know Babu – “Zosh.”  It feels like running into someone famous on the street! Zosh. All the stories Babu has told me about getting yelled at as young girls for giggling under the kitchen sink too loudly and here she is getting a perm.
Nothing else of note happens but I bring the typed pages, in enlarged font, down to Babu and share her own memories back.