My job just got a lot harder!  She has been writing in a five year diary and half way through this month she must have realized that she wont keep this journal for five years or she received a new one for the next year, possible on her birthday.  So, she begins to fill the whole page and I begin to need to transcribe five times the amount of journal entries!!  It’s worth it for what I have figured out.  When she has the space, she will fill it with details, emotions, complaints, and hopes.  I get scenes played out for me when she writes using the whole page and it becomes so much more like reading a novel than like getting a captain’s log style brisk account.  So why does she write in these daily accounts and, except for this rare breaking of the rules, not break the rules more?  Or use bigger journals?  This is very much how Babu is.  She follows the rules and does things as they are expected to be done.  If people at the time wrote this way, that was the way she was going to do them.  I find in her journals, no matter what she does she strives to do it right, to be good at it, and hates it when she’s not.  She’s not a rule breaker, she does not forge her own path.  I am very different from her in this way but what I love about it, and her, is it shows how thoughtful she is and it shows in the way she is considerate to others.

Here is what happens in June, 1934:

June began with contrasts.  There was the childish glee of her beating her chest, yelling, and leaping at her friends, a Tarzan impression, and embarrassing herself in front of a boy in doing so.  An, “Oops, didn’t know you were here…” moment.

Then there was struggling not to fight with her mother, (biologically impossible for mothers and daughters at that age.)  And then her getting cold with another girl who says hello to Babu on her way to see – Caveman!! Her name was Tilly and Babu said she had a “sweet” little voice.  She wrote it like that, with sarcastic quotes!  I love it when Babu gets a little fierce!

She has a small tiff with Jeanette saying that her friend was in the “just duckiest mood” and then she stands up to a pushy girl, with out giving us the details of how!  (I imagine, like me, it was a big deal to Babu but was actually reserved and meek.  But I don’t really know that, do I?)

Just to keep the contrast abundant, she’s playing around just a few days later with Jeanette saying that she’d put poison in her sandwich.  She ends the passage with one word: “fun” and this is not her sarcastic voice.

She peaks through the window a the senior prom, of course she does!  She’s so looking forward to it!!  But to think, in one year’s time she gets her chance to go, but with Jaime, and has no fun at all.

She has a new name for Drobey, so for you readers at home:  Drobey=Caveman=Bottle Slinger.  I think he delivered milk.  She only gives so many nicknames, or initials to the boys she likes.  Everyone else just has names.

There is a Falcon’s meet where Babu is competing in Basketball.  She is terrified.  She twisted up – driven to win and full of insecurity.  It’s quite endearing and she ends it with some success – sort of.  (More to follow in the excerpts.)

School ends for another year and she looks forward to no homework but fears that she will be lonesome.