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MARCH 16, 2024 –  Eventually, war stories go the way of war: they end by exhaustion. That’s a bit how I felt yesterday after concluding Chapter Thirteen – “New Beginnings” of my series War Stories. I have many more “war stories,” but if I’ve tired of telling them, surely my (dwindling) readership has tired of reading them. Alternatively put: When was any of us tuned in to the latest live reports from Kiev, Kerch or Kharkiv (let alone Khartoum)[1]?

Yesterday’s blog entry was Post No. 1,761 over a period of five years come April 14. My 35 AWOL days landed in June and August 2019 during our son and daughter-in-law’s wedding extravaganzas in Portugal and Wisconsin.

This almost unbroken stretch of daily writing isn’t a record for me. From January 1, 1993 to May 21, 2001, I maintained a hand-written journal without skipping a single day. Each entry covered at least a page, usually several pages, and was written in grammatical sentences.

My wife used to say warily, “I wonder what you’re saying about me in all those journals.” If she’s brave enough to inspect any before chucking them into the dumpster after my dismissal from this life, she (and the next-door neighbors) will be relieved to discover that the entries won’t start a post-mortem marital dumpster fire. Or perhaps more likely, she’ll be disappointed that she didn’t receive more extensive mention among the thousands of ink-soaked pages. My main worry, if “worry” properly characterizes my passing thought on the matter, is that our sons—neither of whom is a patient reader—will inadvertently lose a detailed chronicle of their early youth.

Then there’s the issue of legibility. Our sons were among the last American school children to learn cursive writing. I can imagine Cory and Byron flipping through my journals as they help their mom clear out all my junk. They’ll soon realize that to decipher the cursive code would require too much effort—even if they should stumble across the “code” on the inside cover of the later journals: the alphabet written out (in cursive) both in lower-case letters and upper-case.

After my dad died, I pored through his meticulously maintained journals. He was an excellent writer and storyteller; a reflective individual, whose contemplative disposition was evident in much of his other writings. Yet the diurnal entries in the spiral-bound notebooks were a huge disappointment. Typical were a detailed weather report, the distance of his daily walk (invariably three miles), summaries of progress on his latest home or cabin projects, and an excruciatingly detailed account of his trips to three stores before finding the correct sized hardware for one of said projects.  Rarely did he include any reflections, impart any wisdom, or state anything amusing or interesting. I was left to savor briefly the occasional book review or his reaction to a concert he and my mother had attended. Even if Dad’s journals were to survive global thermonuclear war that vaporized 99% of the rest of civilization’s record, future anthropologists would realize that a single entry in Dad’s notebooks would be as revealing as 1,000.

I suppose in the vast scheme of things, the musings inside my journals will never be of greater interest to anyone than the weather reports in Dad’s diaries are alluring to me.

Back to this blog, however: where do I go from here?

Hmmm. The possibilities are infinite. Take for example, a short history of Byzantium . . . (Cont.)

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Or for that matter, Khan Younis in Gaza?