Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(51)

Were I to leave the hotel without writing in my diary, though, I’d feel too antsy and incomplete to enjoy myself. Even if what I’m recording is of no consequence, I’ve got to put it down on paper.

“I think that what you have is a disorder,” Hugh likes to say. But who proves invaluable when he wants the name of that restaurant in Barcelona that served the Camembert ice cream? The brand of soap his mother likes? The punch line of that joke he never thought was funny? “Oh, you remember. Something about a woman donating plasma,” he says.

Of course, the diary helps me as well. “That certainly wasn’t your position on July 7, 1991,” I’ll remind Hugh an hour after we’ve had a fight. I’d have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes a while to look these things up.

The diary also comes in handy with my family, though there it plays the same role as a long-lost photograph. “Remember that time in Greece when I fell asleep on the bus and you coated my eyelids with toothpaste?” I’ll say to my brother, Paul.

To heavy pot smokers, reminders like these are a revelation. “Wait a minute, we went to Greece?”

As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof. In this regard too, my diaries have proven me wrong. All I do is think up impossible situations: here I am milking a panda, then performing surgery, then clearing the state of Arizona with a tidal wave. In late November 2011, my most lurid fantasies involved catching the person who’d stolen my computer, the one I hadn’t backed up in almost a year. I’d printed out my diary through September 21, but the eight weeks that followed were gone forever. “Two months of my life, erased!” I said to Hugh.

He reminded me that I had actually lived those two months. “The time wasn’t stolen,” he said, “just your record of it.” This was a distinction that, after thirty-four years of diary keeping, I was no longer able to recognize. Fortunately I still had my notebooks, and as soon as the police left, I bought a new laptop and sat down to recover my missing eight weeks.

The first challenge was reading my handwriting, and the second was determining what the notes referred to. After making out “shaved stranger,” I thought for a while and recalled a woman in the Dallas airport. We were waiting to board a flight to San Antonio, and I overheard her talking about her cat. It was long-haired, a male, I think, and she had returned home one day the previous summer to find that he had been shaved.

“Well, in that heat it was probably for the best,” the man she was talking to said.

“But it wasn’t me who shaved it,” the woman said. “It was somebody else!”

“A stranger shaved your cat?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” the woman said.

I eventually re-created the missing two months, printed them out, and placed the finished diary in my locked cabinet beside the 136 others that are shelved there.

“What should I do with these things when you die?” Hugh asks.

The way I see it, my options are burial or cremation. “But save the covers,” I tell him. “The covers are nice.”





As for seven-year-old Tyler, who knows if he’ll stick with it? A child’s diary, like a child’s drawing of a house, is a fairly simple affair. “We went to a castle. It was fun. Then we went to a little zoo. That was fun too.”

I thought my account of August 11 would begin with an accident I’d had at the castle. We were in the formal gardens when I took a wrong step and fell down before a great number of people, one of whom shouted—making me feel not just stupid but stupid and old—“Don’t move him!”

My face burned as I picked myself up off the ground.

“That happened to me not long ago,” Pam said, trying to make me feel better.

“It’s what you get for horsing around,” Hugh scolded.

Tyler said simply and honestly, “That was really funny.”

I pulled out my notebook and wrote—as if I would possibly forget about it by the following morning when I’d limp to my desk—“Fell down in garden.” I was mentally writing the diary entry, the embarrassment I felt, the stabbing pain in my knee, the sound of my body skidding on the gravel path, when we entered the castle’s petting zoo and I saw something that moved my fall from the front page to the category of “other news.” The place wasn’t much: some chickens, a family of meerkats, a pony or two. In one large cage lived a pair of ferrets and, next door, some long-haired guinea pigs. A woman and her two sons, aged maybe five and seven, spotted them at the same time I did and raced over to get a better look. The younger boy seemed pleased enough, but his brother went bananas. “Jesus!” he said, turning to look at his mother. “Jesus, will you look at those?”

I pulled out my notebook.

“What are you writing down?” Tyler asked.

“Have you ever seen guinea pigs so big?” the boy asked. “I mean, Jesus!”

The woman offered Tyler and me an embarrassed look. “You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name like that, Jerry. Some people might find it offensive.”