7/06/2010

I had a dream...

Like I'm watching a movie, there are scenes from a girl's life.  In one of them, there are kids on a playground in winter.  It is dark.  The kids stand around in bunches, talking together, until some break off and run around.  Eventually a teacher summons them back to class.  They form up a double file line, and the rear most pair of girls withdraw cigarettes from string purses and somehow light up and have a few drags during the march back to school.

The incident is related in a book- a slim, beige hardbound book that covers a year in the life of its subject.  There is a woman with a stack of these books in her home telling the stories behind them.  Her husband is here with her- she is young middle aged.  She explains how the books worked.  "It really is a club," she says at one point.  She and her friend were both members.  She divides the stack of volumes according to the towns she lived in- at one point explaining that she moved away for a while, but then moved back.  She seems to want to sort the books by the town rather than follow the order of years, so the stack is not in order from newest to oldest.  She opens a volume.

The paper is odd, like the old encyclopedias, sort of yellowish, but smooth.  On each page is a series of dated paragraphs, either describing general events in history or specific instances in the woman's life.  This column takes up the central third of the page- there's plenty of room in the margins for hand-written notes.  A typical entry was like- "August 14, 1969.  Begin two weeks of camp at Nabobiskybobie.  Mom cried."

So it's like a diary, but one with permanence, meant to be shared with others in the club. 

1 comment:

Alebert said...

Life is like a diary with bits of varying permanence,.. meant to be shared with others in the club. Course maybe that is what you were saying.