True Confessions

Worse than a pack rat, I hoard other people's memories, some in diaries that would make people turn in their graves to know I had.

- BUTCH DALISAY

As a collector (make that a scavenger) of old books, manuscripts, and what the market generally calls "ephemera," I inevitably come across material neither written by nor meant for kings and presidents, but rather pedestrians like myself with things to say, perhaps secrets to whisper, likely to no one but to God and posterity.

I'm talking about diaries and journals, which people of my generation used to do (and millennials are back to doing). Worse than a pack rat, I hoard other people's memories, some in diaries that would make people turn in their graves to know I had. I come across these often as discards or stray items among people selling and buying old books, but I find them equally if not even more fascinating than published (and therefore sanitized) material.

Back then, before computers and digital journals, New Year began with the purchase of a new diary, its pristine pages waiting to be filled with birthdays, appointments, expenses—and more interestingly, interjections of love, pain, joy, and grief, life's highest and lowest moments.

I, myself, kept diaries at one time, although the entries tended to peter out around March or April, when fatigue got the better of my enthusiasm. My most interesting one has to be my martial law diary, which I rather presumptuously began as soon as I was thrown in prison at Fort Bonifacio; I say "presumptuously" because, at 17, I entertained the precious thought that somehow, someday, my juvenile musings would be worth something to someone other than my mother (I had yet to find a wife then).