Today marks 41 years exactly since I started talking to myself.
I thought I would commemorate the occasion by starting to draft what could someday be a publishable book. How auspicious to begin such a thing on the anniversary of when all the writing began.
But when you’ve been talking to yourself for so many decades, you can’t just not show up one day without being missed, even if only by yourself. So instead of crafting what would surely become a respectable memoir this morning, I simply picked up the first journal in my spring 2023 series, and wrote a great big long thank you note to the lifelong friend I found between all these lines across so many pages, filling books, stacked in boxes.
As I wrote, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to look at March 22 (or thereabouts) for every year?
So I pulled all the March volumes and flagged those dates.
Somehow I thought I could whip all of this together and still get to job, but it’s going to to take some time to not only collate all this, but contemplate it.
This is enough for now. This … and some basic opening questions.
Where is 1983 (’86, ’88, ’89, ’91, ’92, ’93, ’97, ’99, 2000, ’05, ’08, ’11, ’14, ’16)?
Who was the “you” I was writing to in the early years?
What is the wisdom – if any – in these old words?
I’ll be listening to myself now.
Raye S. Leonard 