The Last Train to Paris and Journals

   I am reading Michele Zackheim's The Last Train to Paris. I picked it up at the bookstore downtown and I have to confess, aside from the fact that it is an Europa Editions publication (which I generally love), I really bought it because of the cover. I have a love of all things postal. Especially book covers that depict letters, stamps, canceled envelopes, etc. The cover of The Last Train to Paris holds all the postal charm you could want in its simple graphic.

   The book begins with the author reminiscing as she is working in her garden. She is an old women who has lived through WWII and she tells her audience just exactly what she does when she feels herself falling into cranky despair. She eats yogurt straight from the container and drinks too much coffee--"sometimes too much whiskey." She bangs around her house and carries on conversations with herself. Finally, she takes pen and paper, and begins to write. A shift comes over her body. "My pen begins to tickle my passion for words and I squirm with pleasure." I love that sentence!

   One thing has stuck with me as I'm reading this book. The author talks about rediscovering her old journals in a rusted over trunk. Once, her friend had come across his old journals and began to read them. He was so disturbed by his earlier self and what he had been through, he gathered the lot in an armful and dumped it into a passing garbage truck. But the author sees it differently. "It will be interesting for me to read my old self. I wonder how honest I was?" 

  I wonder how I will feel as a 70, 80, or (oh, heavens!) a 90 year old women reading my thoughts from when I was twelve and nineteen, and a new bride and a newly nursing mother? I know when I occasionally go back now and read entries, I scoff, just like old women in Last Train to Paris did. "Everything then was so important, so dramatic, so tragic," Sometimes I blush at my own earnestness and innocence.
   I was discuss old writing and journals with my friend, Shaul, recently. He was of the opinion that some things are better let go of then kept to be revisited. "Get rid of that old energy," he said. I thought about it for a while. I briefly considered hauling my some 30 or so journals out to the makeshift fire pit in my backyard and watching them go up in smoke (honestly though, with all that ink they would probably smolder for days). But in the end I didn't. I want to read them later. I want to revisit my old innocent, sad, joyous, disgusted, strange self when all I have to occupy me are memories. Maybe I'll cringe in shame at the things I thought important enough to write. Maybe I'll cheer my self on at my first kiss, though now I burn with embarrassment, STILL 17 years later. But maybe I'll be highly entertained, and that's what I'm hoping for.