Notebooks: A family obsession

I normally bounce around the net to look for articles and such about journals, letter writing and other things that have to do with the power, impact and resonance of the written word.

Diaries from children hiding during World War II, letters to soldiers and memoirs of a distant relative are all occasions where the written word has allows someone of the present to be 'touched' by someone from the past in a way that's not easy to duplicate in our modern, digital society.

My whole family keeps notebooks of some form or another. My grandmother's real estate records, my mother's genealogy research and even my grandfather's rabbit journals (he raises them) are just scratching the surface of how important writing and notebooks are to those who shaped my life growing up.


From: Moleskinerie

As near as I can tell, my writing habit began more than a hundred years ago on a cattle ranch in northern Mexico. That was when my grandmother, at seven years of age, wrote three words in a little notebook her mother, Cristina Terrazas, had given her: hoy murio mama. No capital H, no accent marks, no other details--little Julia Terrazas simply wanted to record that her mother had just died.

Many years later, Julia gave her own daughter, my mother Emma, a notebook in which to jot down everyday happenings, thoughts, prayers and poems. Eventually, when I was nine, my mother also presented me with a notebook. I was confined to a hospital bed after having my tonsils out, was restless, and my mother wanted to keep me out of mischief. "Here," she said, "write what you see, write some stories." I did as she told me, and that's how three generations of Terrazas women passed onto me the itch to write.

I still write in notebooks-my latest one is a lined, pocket-size Moleskine--when I have time and mental space. But like most everyone these days, I've succumbed to the lures of the digital, electronic world. However, I've discovered the ease of e-mail comes with a catch. I can reply, copy, forward, print or save, but ultimately I might as well delete everything because it's all virtual, not tangible the way notebooks, diaries and journals are, especially old ones written by people no longer with us. Such written relics are filled with intimate thoughts, quirky handwriting, odd spelling, smudges, crossed-out words, even doodles and sketches. My mother and grandmother may have died decades ago, but when I hold their creations in my hands and read page after page, I see the world as they did--I touch their lives.

Several years ago, while trying to unravel some disturbing family mysteries, I regularly touched the past in this way. For me, the personal, confessional writing of my relatives had more than sentimental value. The hundreds of entries allowed me to pinpoint dates, names and events, led me to other sources, documents, letters, often to people I could interview. Eventually, my hunt for the truth evolved into a book, a memoir, about my family. Yet the project would never have started if I hadn't wandered into the tool shed behind my grandmother's house in Los Angeles the day we buried her.

Well into her eighties when she died, Mama Julia--as we called her--liked to watch Mexican lucha libre on television. Every week the sequined capes, scary masks and flying leaps off the ropes captivate her for a few hours. The frail old lady I saw whenever I visited her place had always been a quaint, slightly raunchy figure who just happened to like short, tubby men in tights. She'd call me Manos de bragueta, not because I fidgeted with my fly but because in her mind men's hands were vile and had no place in her kitchen. "Fuera, manos de bragueta," she would mutter. "Fuchi, fuchi,"--as if to say, "Yuck! Outta here, boy."

But after her funeral, everyone gathered at her one-bedroom house in a central Los Angeles neighborhood, officially named Elysian Valley but on the street called Frog Town because it runs alongside the L.A. River. We all poked around and took keepsakes of her presence. From the kitchen I came away with the comal--the griddle on which she had made me hundreds of flour tortillas over the years. Then in her bedroom I claimed a photo album no one seemed to want. Finally, I stepped outside and went around back to the tool shed. Inside, behind a rake, hoe and shovel, she had stored a small cardboard box on a shelf. I brought the box out into daylight, opened it and fished out a stack of her notebooks and some index cards covered with her invented prayers and poems. I glanced at a few pages but only remember that the rhymed verses in Spanish spoke about things like love and faith. For a long time after that I kept all her writing stored away and unread.

When my mother died I did the same thing--after the funeral I came away with a bundle of her notebooks and diaries that I found in a bedroom drawer. Yet rather than store them away, eventually I began to read them to look for answers to the lingering questions about the odd circumstances surrounding her death. She died at home at the age of 48 from drug-related heart problems. Months later my father, a secretive, enigmatic U.S. army officer, disappeared from me and my two brothers, never to return.

I read and re-read everything--notebooks, diaries, journals, letters, postcards, store receipts with scribbled notes on the back. For the most part they gave me the answers to my questions. But the truth wasn't always in facts. Often it was in the touch of words. As a writer, in trying to create whole lives, of real people who lived and had minds and dreams and desires of their own, I was blessed by having all this in their own words. When Julia Terrazas writes that her mother died, or when Emma Arias writes on July 19, 1952 that she longs for her husband--who was then a prisoner of war in North Korea--I know I'm touching the truth.