Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(50)

I wanted to deny him, but that’s the terrible power of a diary: it not only calls forth the person you used to be but rubs your nose in him, reminding you that not all change is evolutionary. More often than not, you didn’t learn from your mistakes. You didn’t get wiser but simply older, growing from the twenty-five-year-old who got stoned and accidentally peed on his friend Katherine’s kitten to the thirty-five-year-old who got drunk and peed in the sandbox at his old elementary school. “The sandbox!” my sister Amy said at the time. “Don’t you realize that children have to pee in there?”





My diary regained its footing after I gave up speed. Writing-wise it was still clumsy, but at least the focus widened. I didn’t own a TV at the time but wrote a lot about the radio I was listening to. Occasionally I’d tune in to a music station, but I always preferred the sound of people talking, even if the subject was something I didn’t care about—sports, for instance, or the likelihood of Jesus returning within the next few hours.

Radio played a bigger role in my diary when I moved to Chicago in 1984 and started listening to a weekly Sunday-night program called Getting Personal, hosted by a woman named Phyllis Levy. It’s easy to hear a sex therapist today, but this was not a podcast or a satellite program where you could use whatever language you wanted to. Phyllis Levy was on a commercial station. Both she and her callers had to watch their mouths, thus using words like “pleasuring” and “cavity,” which somehow sound much dirtier than their more common alternatives.

I often wrote about how understanding this woman was, how accepting. The only time I recall her drawing the line was when a man wanted to have sex in his half-blind wife’s empty eye socket. Looking back, I think it must have been a joke. I mean, really, who does things like that? Phyllis, to her credit, took the call seriously, gently suggesting that with the wealth of other holes nature has provided us, perhaps this particular one was best left unexplored. Coming from North Carolina, I couldn’t believe that this was on the radio. And on a Sunday! I used to listen at the typewriter and copy down the questions and answers I found most compelling. Other people’s sex lives were great fun to write about. When it came to my own, however, I couldn’t have been more discreet. Early diaries mention that “B. came over and spent the night” or that “After dinner M. and I were romantic twice.” There are no details, much less full names. I think I worried that if someone ever read what I had written, the sex would be more embarrassing than, what, exactly? The whining about not having sex?





While a student in Chicago, my worst fear was realized when someone I’d been seriously dating got his hands on my diary. I was out of town at the time, and later learned that he was hurt, not by what I’d written about him but by his almost complete absence. I’d actually devoted more space to my barber than I had to him, and of course to the goings-on at school. At the start of my second year, I signed up for a creative-writing class. The instructor, a woman named Lynn, demanded that we each keep a journal and that we surrender it twice during the course of the semester. This meant that I’d be writing two diaries, one for myself and a second, heavily edited one, for her.

The entries I ultimately handed in are the sorts I read onstage sometimes, the .01 percent that might possibly qualify as entertaining: a joke I heard, a T-shirt slogan, a bit of inside information passed on by a waitress or cabdriver. To find these things, I turn to my diary index, which leaves out all the mumbly stuff and lists only items that might come in handy someday.

Volume 87, 5/15: Lisa puts a used Kotex through the wash, and her husband mistakes it for a shoulder pad.

Volume 128, 1/23: Told by saleswoman that the coat I’m trying on is waterproof “if it only rains a little.”

Volume 129, 4/6: I write down my e-mail address for Ian, and after looking at it he says, “Oh my God. You have handwriting just like Hitler’s.” Note: what kind of person knows what Hitler’s handwriting looks like?

Volume 132, 12/5: Sister Gretchen has her furnace serviced by a man named Mike Hunt.



Over a given three-month period, there may be fifty bits worth noting, and six that, with a little work, I might consider reading out loud. Leafing through the index, which now numbers 280 pages, I note how my entries have changed over the years, becoming less reflective and more sketchlike. It’s five a.m. in the lobby of the La Valencia Hotel, and two employees are discussing parental advice. “I tell my sons they should always hold the door open for a woman,” says the desk clerk. He is a Hispanic man, portly, with a lot of silver in his mouth. A second man stands not far away, putting newspapers into bags, and he nods in agreement. “I tell them it doesn’t matter who the lady is. It could be a fat chick, but on the other side of the room, a pretty one might look over and notice, so even then it’s not wasted.”

Here is a passenger on the Eurostar from Paris to London, an American woman in a sand-colored vest hitting her teenage granddaughter with a guidebook until the girl cries. “You are a very lazy, very selfish person,” she scolds. “Nothing like your sister.”

If I sit down six months or a year or five years from now and decide to put this into an essay, I’ll no doubt berate myself for not adding more details. What sort of shoes was the granddaughter wearing? What was the name of the book the old woman was hitting her with? But if you added every detail of everything that struck you as curious or spectacular, you’d have no time for anything else. As it is, I seem to be pushing it. Hugh and I will go on a trip, and while he’s out, walking the streets of Manila or Reykjavík or wherever we happen to be, I’m back at the hotel, writing about an argument we’d overheard in the breakfast room. It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”