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Journal-Keeping - A Passion for Posterity

© Jody Hart Lehrer

She curled her tiny toes during the impression. You can see this when you open the little journal to the inside cover and look closely at the infant's footprint on the page there. Blue finger-paint applied with a cotton ball to my eight-month old's foot was used to capture forever the shape and size of her sweet baby step.

Hannah, my daughter (who is now five years and eight months old), will in the years to come, perhaps when she is a teenager, maybe when she is a young adult, see that printed baby's foot and be swept back in time.

The act of keeping a journal is a wonderfully personal one that will allow a journal reader (whether this is the keeper of the journal or another individual) to stroll through a thousand yesterdays and, practically, to be there "in the moment."

Such incidents retold in journals -- such thoughts expressed within the pages (whether joyous or very sad) -- have a two-fold benefit. First, they help the keeper of the journal to share thoughts and feelings she may never divulge personally to another human being as long as she lives. Second, the journal paints an intimate picture of an individual for others to see.

For me, keeping a journal about my daughter Hannah's life with me, is the most intimate expression of love that I can bestow upon her. The journals I have kept studiously since my daughter was an infant, writing in them by hand nearly each night, now number eleven. There are literally thousands of pages of entries.

On each journal, I have labeled the dates of both the first and the last entries (the earliest journal about my Hannah begins in July 1995 and concludes in November 1995). In each journal, I have made an impression of her foot or her hand with finger-paint on the inside front or rear cover, with the date on which the image was made.

In many journals I have placed an occassional photograph, such as the tender and beautiful one of Hannah taken with her wonderful paternal grandfather who died years ago.

In that photo, she smiles at someone or something -- real or imagined -- just to the right of the photographer, the fingers of her tiny hands intertwined. Her grandfather, supremely happy, nestles into Hannah's neck. I included this photo in the journal in order to commemorate her grandfather's passing, along with a written entry about the touching and tearful memorial service in his honor (that my daughter did not attend, as she was too young).