I continue the process of going back through my old posts and I get no farther than the second post I ever released out to the blogosphere, before my mind over loaded with revelries and nostalgia.  I sometimes wish she were still in school, writing papers and sniping about her teachers in her diary.  It’s so quintessential.  School days.  Growing Up.  I’m happy as well for the passage of time, seeing her come into her own.  Seeing her start, barely, to settle down.  It’s really neat that every stage of her life is going to play out in front of my eyes.  Here is:

The First Week of 1935

I read it and laughed.  I find it hard to believe that I would even consider that she might destroy a diary.  She is the archivist, the historian, not me.  Although I say it about myself,  It’s not true.  I’m rerecording what she first chronicled.  I’m refiling what she carefully set down decades ago and throughout all this time kept meticulous track of.  Even without computers or digital cameras she kept neat track.  Notebooks in piles, nearly every day written down, friends and former stranger’s first and last names recorded for posterity.  (Babu and I met a woman today whose mother had gone to Bay Path College with Babu.  I could have asked for her mother’s name, I’m sure it would have been familiar to me, but it wasn’t the time or place.  I wish I had.)  Pictures were tucked in photo albums with all their secrets written on the back.  It makes me ashamed of how cluttered and scattered my files are.  I need a triple back up.  These things must never be lost.

Some of them could have been.  I was amazed at why, beyond the odds really, we managed to find her 1934 diary.  I wrote about it here:

What You Get for Being a Naggy Wife

It still seems like such a coincidence, kismet even!

Like I have said a million times before, this process still floors me.  I’m still obsessed.  Through that obsession however, has come several iterations of evolution.  The things I didn’t know when I started, about blogging, about how to write this story, about her, about her past, about grammar…And as I figure out how I am going to tell this story, what form a book will take, (it’s exhausting to think there will be a book,) my storytelling pattern changes.

One thing I didn’t know was how, when, and why to insert internal links.  I know these things now, so click on those links if you will and see how far I’ve come, how far Babu came in those years, and the progress this project has made!

As always, thank you for being such a supportive blogging environment!