A place for thoughts: Area residents use journals for therapy, collecting life stories.

A nice story I came across recently, in which a reporter for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette named Jaclyn Youhana asks

“Do many people keep a diary any more? When I asked readers to contact me if they did, I had no idea so many would respond. I received more than 30 emails and phone calls from men and women, young and old, who wanted to tell about what they wrote and why.”

The article goes on to describe the diaries of some of the respondents, with photos and a video.

A daily log

Jon Pontzius of Columbia City [pictured above] has kept a journal for 25 years. Now 72, he’s not sure what prompted him to start writing as a nearly 50-year-old man.

 

Pontzius writes daily or weekly in spiral notebooks. He keeps them in a portable container meant for files, spiral-side up. Many have a red marbled cover and are filled, cover to cover, with his black, looping script. Many of the spirals are bent and stuffed with those ribbons that are created when a page is ripped out.

 

“These are the rattiest-looking diaries you’ve ever seen,” Pontzius says. “But it’s what inside that counts, I guess.”

And what’s inside are doodles and quick drawings of ideas to be turned into sculptures. Pontzius is an artist, and many of his completed works start as a few sloppy lines in the pages of his journal.

There’s also writing, and a lot of it. He details days and people worth remembering – like that time a tornado smashed his pickup while he hid out in a freezer at an Arby’s. One of the few things he was able to salvage from his truck was his journal. He shows me some of the mud splatters on a page, and I can’t help but think how grateful he must be to have saved this piece of history.

Read more here.