That last entry hasn’t been sitting well with me. It was truly felt and the theme was sincere, but I’m afraid it comes off too much like “oh yes, I’ve connected with a homeless person, now what a good citizen I am!” It’s like this well-meaning short story I wrote in my journal in 5th grade about the perils of racial prejudice. Just so mortifyingly naïve in retrospect, it pretty much nullifies any noble sentiments that were its impetus.

Indeed, I’d started digitizing all my old journals, finally (something I’ve been meaning to do for years, thanks to my mania for archiving and an obscure nagging fear of losing my personal written history in some kind of unforeseen disaster). I got through the all of the first volume and half of the second and I came to that story — sandwiched between my feelings about Edgar Allen Poe’s melancholy oeuvre and laments about almost by not quite being asked to some dance. I had to stop transcribing. I was too embarrassed to read this story aloud into MacDictate, even alone in my bedroom, and to save it into a digital file no one would ever see. I mean, I used the word “Negro” repeatedly, for heaven’s sake. Granted, this was the early 80s, the term “PC” had not yet been coined and I had far more experience with 19th and early 20th century literature than with real life cultural and racial diversity.

All this is to say that I’m all very well-meaning, but there are still things I’m not necessarily sophisticated enough to write well or meaningfully about. Give me a few more decades.