Flashback to Christmas, 1995.  Mimi and Pawpaw, my great grandparents, give me a diary.  It’s green with poppies and a profile drawing of a forlorn looking black and white cat, gazing thoughtfully into the unknown.  Its most important feature is the lock.  The inside cover holds a note from Mimi in her curly script: “This diary belongs to Lynn Anne Harris.  From Mimi and Pawpaw.  “Happy teen years.”  1995.

Why did she put the “Happy teen years” part in quotation marks?  Did she realize that maybe “happy” is not the best way to describe ages 12-19?  Had she written, “Let loose your inner angst,” I may not have responded to this gift with so much enthusiasm.  As it turned out, I spent the next seven years recording the heights of joy and the depths of misery in enough journals to fill a small suitcase.

But, back to the beginning.  The feline on the front of the diary reminded me of my own dear pet, and so I did what any logical pre-teen girl would do: every day I wrote a letter to my cat.

I started my life story on the day when most people undertake new projects: New Year’s Day.  I honestly believed that I was a really interesting person and that the things I had to say would someday be published and end up as required reading in high school classes across the country.  In hindsight I can see that, at the age of 12, I was lacking in literary skills, my spelling was mediocre, and grammatical errors were abundant.  However, I have come to see the teen diary as a vehicle for humor, and maybe my desire to share my feelings with the world was not so outlandish after all.  I just need to take myself a little less seriously.

The first entry is as follows:

“Monday January 1st, 1996

Dear Kirby,

Today was a wonderful day.  I talked to CLT on my new turquoise phone!  For most of the day I did my new latch hook pillow.  It is fun.  At 4:00, we went to M’s.  BM and I had loads of fun.  I got caught under the mistletoe by Penelope!”

While it is not insightful at all, and certainly not interesting, these seven sentences sum up a lot of who I was in the month before my 13th birthday.  An excellent day consisted of making as much use of the telephone as possible.  I liked crafts.  I liked boys.  Things were described as either “fun” or “boring.”

My friends and I developed code names for all of the boys in our lives, so that we could talk freely about our love in front of those implicated.  Penelope was the older brother of BM, one of my best friends, and for quite some time I firmly believed that no matter how many other boys I liked, in the end I would marry him.  Alas, we didn’t kiss on that night, or ever.  When I wrote “caught under the mistletoe,” I’m sure it chanced to happen that we were walking in opposite directions through a doorway at the same time.  Still, in the life of young me, that was big news.