Dear Diary

At the age of 15, James Drummond Ferguson left his working-class school in Glasgow, Scotland to apprentice as a printer.  By the time he was in his mid-60’s, he and his wife, Bessie, were retired and living in Starlight Hills, a modest suburb in Fremont, California – also known as the end of the BART line. He went to church on Sundays, paid his union dues and sat in his mushroom-colored recliner after supper to watch his favorite TV shows, like Cheers and Seinfeld.

James, who was my husband’s father, also kept a daily diary. Although his letter-writing style was both humorous and elegant (with the rhythm of his rich Scottish brogue giving his correspondence with old friends a rolling, musical quality), his diary entries were different. Each one was brief. Almost as dry as a grocery list, they provided a simple record of that day’s activities – “Walked around Lake Elizabeth,” “Met with elders,” “Potluck with the Moores,” “Phoned Neil.”

I still remember him showing me one of these volumes after dinner one evening in 1988. Although I’d worked professionally as a business writer and an editor, I’d never been interested in keeping a diary before that moment and certainly never thought of myself as being especially creative. Inspired by my father-in-law’s simple entries, though, I started my own journal the next week. Like James, I began by keeping my entries short, but soon (and with no conscious effort on my part), they gradually morphed into tentative explorations of storytelling that were sprinkled with metaphors and images and a voice that sounded a lot like me.

Looking back, I can see how, with my father-in-law’s help, I accidentally tricked myself into becoming a fiction writer and a poet. Instead of picking up a pen and saying “I shall now write a Poem,” I simply opened my Week-at-a-Glance diary and began with the words “Murray and I drove to Brookings.”