Spiral Notebook
Growth. Repetition. Echoes.
In November, 1964, I went to the Caldor in Danbury, Connecticut and bought a diary. For the next year, I tried to record each day’s events. Since 1964, I have been journaling through my twenties and thirties and now my seventies. If I read through them order, year by year, it’s a series of ordinary stories: family life, kids, vacations, work. When I look back through the lens of a single day, I see patterns I never noticed. Growth. Repetition. Echoes. Time becomes a spiral instead of a line.
Anyone can read, comment, and share. I think of this as a primary source for someone else to discover and transform. I worry about future historians, trying to sift through all of our digital detritus for clues about daily life. I could donate my journals to some archive and maybe someone will stumble across them while they are researching Beatlemania. Or I can put them here, and so I am. If you see the germ of a story, mini-series, or opera, go for it.
Looking for more about my work on gender and clothing? Check out Gender Mystique, also on Substack.
