Journals

I have kept journals for years.  Most of them were stored in my mother's hope chest in our bedroom. The movers said that the chest was too fragile for such a heavy load so they packed the journals in a regular box.  This seemed all wrong to me for my very private "therapy" journals--just to be sitting in a cardboard box in a storage facility somewhere.  I had begun the process of purging them but it is a painful process to be reminded of times when I needed to vent--and there were plenty of them.  Yet I hesitate to burn the whole pack of them because many of them are mixed up with good memories of the kids' younger years or travel adventures.

 Recently I have split my journals into a therapy journal online which can be easily deleted and a spiritual journal online which is great to look back on and be reminded of good and helpful thoughts.  And then for more public consumption, there is this blog.

The point of this is that journals are very important and valuable to me.  So it gives me pain to record that we just threw out Jim's dad's journals over a 50 year period.   Jim did not want them nor did his siblings.  We hesitated to give them to the archives at Calvin College because there were some controversies in  Dad's career along with some criticism of others who are still alive today.  Plus the print was impossibly small and much was very routine--what the Tigers did or how he slept or what he preached on that Sunday.

A woman in my Bible Study suggested retrieving a journal for each of the birth years of the grandchildren and presenting them to them.  Fortunately the nine grandchildren were all born in different years.  There was also a journal for 1956, the year Jim's youngest sibling was born and the account of her birth and Dad's becoming Mr. Mom for a while was fun to read.

We saw a movie a few weeks ago called From Cairo to the Cloud, a story of the genizah in Egypt which stored Jewish documents since the 12th century.  The opening scene was of modern-day Jewish folk burying their sacred texts and other texts that mentioned the name of God.  I thought that maybe we should dig a hole in our backyard and bury Dad's journals.  But our yard was full of roots and it would be hard to dig a hole.

So....after supper tonight we bundled up the remaining journals in two big blue bags and unceremoniously put them in the dumpster behind our Airbnb here in South Bend.  I am sad about doing so.