Lunch

When I was about 12 years old my mother gave me a diary and told me to keep my secrets in it. It was tiny -- no bigger than a birthday card, no thicker than my two fingers. Two fingers of secrets. It had a cloth cover with brightly colored flowers all over it, altogether too jolly for the darkness I wanted to unload. But it did have a lock, which gave its contents, no matter how frivolous, an elevated importance and made writing in it a clandestine act. I wrote in it furtively, hiding under my bed, and never committed anything I didn’t mind my brother reading. It was a flimsy lock.

Sister Annette made us keep a journal in our senior writing class. When I asked her what the difference between a diary and a journal was, she told me that we would get class credit for writing in a journal and she didn’t care if we kept a diary or not. And a journal doesn’t have a lock.

She told us we could write anything at all in our journal as long as we “wrote with new eyes.” We were forbidden to write about anything ordinary or to echo the thoughts of anyone else. By way of example, she told us we could write about the curve of a tree or the veins on our grandmothers’ hands, except we couldn’t now because she’d just mentioned those two things. But the biggest rule was that we could not write about ordinary things, that we could not -- repeat, could not, write about what we had for lunch. Just knowing that made me hyper aware of food. I became obsessed with the grainy texture of applesauce, the burnt sienna halo of the grease surrounding the sloppy joe meat, the salty, crunchy hammocks of fritos in the frito pie. I kept all of these observations locked away from Sister Annette. Being so contrary, it’s little wonder I didn’t become a food writer.

If Sister Annette were around now I’d love to ask her what the difference between a blog and journal is. I have to imagine she’d tell me that you don’t get class credit for a blog and the ban on writing about lunch is lifted.

And a blog doesn’t have a lock.