Babu is so engrossed in a book she can’t do her homework. I looked it up and it was hard to find but it seems to be “There’s Always Tomorrow” by Ursula Parrott, a romance novel. 🙂 She gets her rose shaded glasses and finds out her eyes were pretty bad. To think she sees…
Author: transcribingmemory
Maps to Where She’s Been
April is National Poetry Month! My mind seemed to have forgotten by not my fingers. I’ve been producing a lot of poems lately. I thought I’d share! Maps to Where She’s Been She fears the murky places in her memory, Places she can no longer go. Ancient cartographers would have simply scrawled “There be dragons”…
Excerpt from the first week of April
Tuesday April 2, 1930 Oh but I am an awful person. I’m so jealous of Jeanette. You know Diary, how popular she is. I wish I could be! Oh I’ll never click. She has a whole train of attendants and what have I. She jumped 4:2 today. Wonderful! I better start training for running and…
Ode to Miss Short – and – Might as Well, Miss Caswell
Babu read out loud: “Miss Short embarrassed me. She called me a tomboy for sitting on the arm of a chair.” She looked up at me with eyebrows scrunched and lips pouted. A pointed look. It said: “See what I mean?” Maybe a modern teen would just say “da fuck??” I’m sending this out as…
The First Week of April, 1935
April fool’s day pranks – Babu fell for one but didn’t enact her own. Her teacher embarrasses her again – but it’s not an April Fool’s joke, it’s her M.O. Babu laments her lack of popularity and her abundance of zits. Fooey ! She is beautiful, kind, interesting, and smart. People clearly love her and…
Excerpts from March
In my last post I didn’t share all the adorable Babu quotes for March because there were some entire passages that I wanted to share. Saturday, March 16, 1935 I loved today. I was mostly sun shining and oh so warm. All the kids were out playing. Sophie was in bed because she got an…
What does this silence speak?
What did my silence from this blog for so long indicate? And what does her silent reading now show? I’m back at it so I bring all of March 1935’s journals down to Babu. She begins reading and, like every single other time, she tells me: “I’ve never seen Jenete written that way.” Then she…
The Second, Third, and Fourth Week of March
Babu celebrates her 17th birthday! Her mother gives her a beautiful compact and her friend gives her a slip – with lace! Babu is up to more shenanigans. The class, and Babu, get answers from another girl for the English test and then she and Sophie use the excuse of the crowd to skip church,…
What I’ve learned so far…
I’ve learned… …that this is important. And it’s important to do now. The blog keeps me accountable but really it’s about the time spent with her sharing the memories and people and retelling her story, the one she wrote, back to her. ….that even though that sounds like I’m doing her a favor, she has…
“Just don’t think about it and do it.”
My life can’t just be simple: Go to work, come home, help to take care of my grandmother, spend time with husband, cook and clean and take care of myself. For many reasons and due to many X factors, it isn’t like that at all, the first three are the only ones that happen with…
Fourth Week of February and First Week of March 1935
She started an autograph book and still seems to be swooning a little over having gotten WBZ’s autograph. She talks with a classmate, Evelyn, about going away to school. She hopes she wont have to go alone. Someone Johnny takes care of got Scarlet fever and he is not allowed back at school and Babu’s…
Reading her journals – The experience so far.
I was surprised initially reading her journals that they were so clinical. Not only were they almost simply a clean record of the day, but they lacked detail. What does this club you attended do? What was your theme about? Why weren’t you going to prom? I expected them to be secretive and was surprised…
transcribingmemory 