Keeping Track of the Days

Last year, my 11-year-old granddaughter and I decided to take up an email writing project in which every Sunday we would each write a ‘weekly report’ in which we would each detail at least three things that we had done that week and something about the events. She’s a home schooler and learned how to type early, but like anybody with a computer and typing skills, the actual skills of writing tend to drop off little by little, or not to get developed at all. Twenty years of writing email without any capital letters certainly hasn’t improved my work. I don’t have much experience with texting, so I haven’t those habits, that feel for words transmitted only as consonants. That’s more in her line, along with emoticons. But we both share the computer keyboard’s fondness for actual and near homophones: your, you’re, yore—all the same word, however you happen to be spelling it today.

Anyway, we began this in early January of 2008, and with the exception of one week, in the summer when she was actually visiting us, we kept it up every week. At the beginning, her ‘weekly reports’ tended to be a little vague and pretty short. ‘We had breakfast and hung around for awhile and then went swimming.’ But very quickly, she began to write more elaborate and careful accounts of what she was doing. Very quickly, I was given the gift of sharing some bits of her life that would never otherwise have been possible. I can talk to her on the phone, but she’s not likely to tell me all this stuff just on a phone call. It isn’t that she was letting me in on intimate secrets of her life. It was that she was letting me in on the dailyness of her life. Her Girl Scout activities; her trips with friends to museums or camp or Horse Bowl (a team competition that involves knowing a lot about horses), or whatever; her swimming meets, her ballet classes, her piano recital; her struggles with her young brother, those struggles that all siblings have; the books she was reading and the games she was playing; the trips she took. Everything familiar, everything made new from her eyes. After a few months, it was rarely a 3-event report, and never brief.

On my part, I sometimes had to struggle to keep up. I write with facility, but I had to really focus on what I had done during a week that was capable (or worthy) of being reported to an 11-year-old. Easiest when there were adventures with the ponies across the street from us to report on. Some weeks, on Friday (the report was due on Sunday), I’d try to think of something to do so that I could write about it to her: go to the beach, to a parade, to a concert. I quickly realized how very much of my life is internal and not easily conveyed to anyone else.

So we have both learned something: she to write more easily and to write better; I to try to ensure that there is something external in my life, not just thinking and reflecting. And we have surely learned something about one another that would have been hard to achieve otherwise. But now we are at the end. We could go on for another year, I suppose, but we decided to end the experiment as the year ended. Soon, I’ll get around to printing up the by-now 50,000 word set of ‘weekly reports’ so that, years from now, she will know what both she and I were doing in a long ago year. I have no idea whatsoever what I did when I was eleven: at least not in any specific sense. She’ll have it.

And now we are engaged in a new experiment: a virtual book club. We’re starting with her and my older daughter and one of my quilting students and her mother and me. And we’re reading Oliver Twist, the first English language novel that had a child as its central character.