A place for the common place

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

The 16-year-old says I stole her idea. She has been keeping what she calls a "common place book," for half a year now, since her English teacher, Mr. Schauble, introduced the concept to her class.

It's really a very UNcommon book, a journal augmented by other things, more like a scrapbook than a diary.

Usually teachers tell students to keep a journal, to write down thoughts and feelings and records of what transpires in every day life. Write about the weather if you have to - just write something, teachers repeatedly say.

The idea, of course, is that writing is a habit and that the habit, once begun, will flourish, turning even bland reports into introspective prose.

But it doesn't always work this way. An empty book with its pristine pages can intimidate. Ordinary events often don't seem special enough to record. Kids, and adults, too, want what they put in writing to be important; when a thing doesn't seem to be, many are reluctant to write.

I have diaries dating back years, but not one is filled. I have dozens of beginnings and not a single end. I always intended to keep up. I always vowed that this time would be different; I'd write every day.

But some days there was nothing to say, or I didn't feel like writing, or there wasn't enough time to write.

And the days went by and the diary sat empty - a constant reminder, not of the past, but of failing to do what I'd intended to do.

When my daughter began her common place book months ago, I didn't think of it as a diary at all. It was a "common place" where she could keep items that meant something to her. She pasted pictures in her book and Newsweek cartoons and quotes from movies and Red Sox ticket stubs - things she wanted to remember and look at again.

She wrote in it, too, but sporadically and randomly. She wrote lists and drafts of letters and beginnings of stories - ragged, jagged thoughts.

But everything was okay for this book. That's what she told me. It was hers. Her teacher said she could paste in it, draw in it, scribble in it. She could do whatever she pleased.

In the middle of June I met an adult who kept a common place book. Only she didn't know it. She called hers a journal. She was showing me something in her briefcase, and the journal fell out, a flowered covered book fat with writings and postcards and all kinds of clippings. It seems that she'd been keeping this journal for just a few months. "I've had this book for 10 years," she said, "but I never used it before. I got this idea from a woman I met in Italy."

I began keeping my common place book right after. My friend, Julia, gave me a "Plain and Simple Journal" for Christmas, but it had sat on a shelf untouched because I didn't want to start another diary I knew I would never finish.

I know I will finish this one. Already it is thick with newspapers clippings, quotes from magazines and books, tickets from movies, programs from plays, pictures cut from flyers, receipts, even - all pieces of things, not the whole, but just enough so that years from now I will remember how I spent my life.

There is writing, too - not great prose, but more than weather reports. There are facts, reflections, opinion, a real record.

"We did this today. I think this. I feel that."

I love this book the way I've never loved a diary. A diary is an obligation. This book is fun. It has permission to grow into anything. It reminds me of the scrapbooks I kept when I was a child, full of matchbooks from restaurants, and swizzle sticks, and pictures from movie magazines, and greeting cards too special to throw away, and photographs, and notes passed in class, and invitations to parties and proms.

You think you outgrow these things. I thought I did. But here I am cutting and pasting, writing and drawing - recording ordinary, every day events, which, in time, will seem extraordinary, collecting moments that left uncollected are always forgotten.