December 11, 2010
Saturday
Don’t throw the past away.
You might need it some rainy day . . .
When everything old is new again.
              — Peter Allen, 1944-1992
                  Australian songwriter and entertainer
I first knew Lynda online in 1999, when I fell into a group known as Diary-l, an e-mail discussion list that had sprung up among the earliest practitioners of the art of online journalling. I was in my first year out of the classroom, still trying to define who I was and what I was about now that I was no longer employed as a teacher.
I’d begun writing observations about my everyday life and e-mailing them to friends. I wrote, for example, about gaining access to the street where a scene from Girl, Interrupted was being filmed by walking around confidently (it was the neighborhood I’d grown up in) carrying a clipboard. I soon learned that this was how personal sites got started. People wanted to keep in touch with old friends or faraway family, and posting to a website seemed better than sending a chain of e-mails. Within a week of my finding Diary-l, I had secured the silkentent.com domain and begun “My Letter to the World,” the first title I used for my ongoing collection of personal essays.
Most electronic discussion lists and message boards come to be populated by a small core of frequent contributors, with some chiming in occasionally and others lurking silently, sometimes for years. I became one of the frequent contributors, along with Lynda and a dozen or so others. In 2000, list founder (at least I think he was) Ryan Ozawa organized the first of several JournalCons, a conference/convention held that year in Pittsburgh. I was a speaker there as well as a participant, and that is where I actually met Lynda and others.
After a few more years, Diary-l fell into disuse. Its last activity was in 2007, when someone wrote that she misses the list. That ignited a chorus of “Me too!” replies, but it did not revive the list.
Lynda was by that time long silent on the list. Her website had gone dark early in 2006. She lives with a chronic illness which sometimes has intense flareups, and she was experiencing some upheavals in her personal relationships as well. First, her journal went password-protected (and I didn’t have access), and then disappeared altogether.
I missed her voice. She wrote a lot about food, about how to feed a large family enjoyable and nutritious meals on a tight budget. It was she who introduced me to Community Sustainable Agriculture and the four years that we got our summer and fall produce almost exclusively from a local organic farm.
I would think about her from time to time, especially at Christmas, when I got out and hung on the tree the ornament pictured at left. She sent it to me in 2000, not long after I met her at JournalCon. She offered to cross-stitch an ornament for any reader who asked. Knowing that her illness affects her joints, I considered this a great gift.
Early in 2009, on a list where the remnant of Diary-l still keeps at it, the moderator asked, “Whose journal do you miss?” I offered Lynda’s name, and others said, oh yeah, I miss her too. I wrote to the moderator privately that I hoped that might draw her out, that surely someone knew someone who knew someone . . .
And then, about a month ago, someone from that long ago Diary-l community, another person I’d actually met in Pittsburgh, mused out loud on her Facebook status about missing Lynda. “She’s on Facebook,” somebody else said, and suddenly there was one of those rounds of friending and posting that I have enjoyed before, when one connection leads to another and another and there you are, catching up with people you’ve never really forgotten and who have not forgotten you either.
More than any other time of the year, Christmas is the season for nostalgia, for connecting with the best that the past has to offer and moving into something new. I hung Lynda’s ornament today, happy that I had never lost track of it, never discarded it. Both of our lives and those of the people we knew together have changed, and yet the old connections can be reclaimed, forged anew.
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