Memoir: Boxes

I started keeping a journal during college. It seemed like everyone was doing it. Keeping a journal was one component of self-discovery, and self-discovery was an epidemic in New York City in the 1970’s. Coming off of the oppositional energy of the 60’s, we turned creative in the 70’s. We were inventing our world. I wrote and wrote, carrying my notebook everywhere I went and dedicating large blocks of time daily to contemplation and self-expression.

I valued my own views, and wrote them down. I trusted my instincts and insights. I respected my own mind and challenged myself to think deeply and clearly, and to come to defensible conclusions. It seemed there was an endless supply of issues to sort out, experiences to be weighed in on, positions to be taken, choices to be made. All this mental activity found its way to the juncture of pen and paper. Words filled the pages and the pages filled the books and binders and before long I’d filled many boxes with my journalings.

When I occasionally reviewed some of what I had written down, I was struck with the clarity of my own thinking, the uniqueness of my voice and the freshness of my descriptions and images. I discovered myself as a writer in those pages and they became precious to me.

So when I packed up to leave New York, I carefully boxed up my writings. I filled eight boxes and put them in storage, planning to send for them once I was settled on the west coast. I entrusted them into the safe keeping of a friend of a friend, who owned a moving company and promised me they would be safe and sound in his warehouse until I called for them.

The boxes were marked clearly, “Journals and Writing.” A year passed. I found a place to live in L.A., and flew back to New York to tie up my loose ends. When I got to the warehouse to gather my eight boxes of writing, I found the boxes were open. The contents were disheveled, and scattered on the floor. My papers were overflowing from every box. It was worse than disorderly. I stood there a moment in shock.

Then it hit me. My writings had been stored there so long that they were considered abandoned. The boxes had been raided, if only for some momentary entertainment. Or maybe the prospect of reading a single woman’s diaries was just too irresistible to pass up. I stood there staring at this personal violation and I remember the blood rushing hot to my cheeks and blazing up my neck. My ears were on fire, and I hesitated to turn around and make eye contact with the half dozen or so men who I knew were watching quietly from behind me.

I started picking up my papers and putting them back into the open boxes. My mind took inventory. How many intimate moments had I described in my writings? How much had I exposed myself to these strangers? And what was left now of my dignity? When I finally got up the courage to turn around and look at those men, the owner was watching me. “I don’t know who did it,” he said. And then, “I’m really sorry.” I nodded and asked for some packing tape. “No problem,” he said. I remember how it felt like bandaging a wound. But even after I had them all boxed up again, I still felt naked and exposed. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I carried the boxes out to the street and hailed a cab, and only as I drove away down that crowded side street in midtown, did my sense of integrity begin to return.