A lovely story from the Washington Post:
Woman, 100, has journaled every day for 90 years: ‘No excuse for me not to’
Evie Riski’s father gave her a diary so she could follow his tradition of recording the day’s events in her hometown. It was a week before her 11th birthday.
Nine decades and almost 33,000 entries later, Riski is still at it, journaling every night before bedtime in her independent living apartment in Lakota, N.D., about 20 miles from where she grew up in Niagara.
Riski, who turned 100 last month, has not missed a single day of writing since her first diary entry on Jan. 1, 1936.
I just loved this story– talk about consistency! And I liked seeing that she stores her diaries in much the same way I do, dating them on the edge, though it looks like she dates hers on the top edge and I date mine on the bottom edge.
One thing that surprised me was that there were a few negative reader comments on the Post article, rather snidely saying that Riski’s diary entries weren’t very substantive or reflective. The examples shown were all from her childhood, so you’d think people would be a little more understanding that a 10-year old didn’t spend a lot of time writing about world events and her place in history. But I also think these comments point to a misunderstanding of the difference in keeping a diary vs. a journal.
The terms diary and journal tend to be used interchangeably, (including in the quote above) but a diary is usually a record of events– brief notes about what happened on a certain day. That seems to be the format Riski has consistently employed, often in small diaries with only a few lines per day. (Similar to the Harvard Coop diaries I used when I was that age.) But a journal is a more expansive kind of diary, with longer form entries that are more descriptive of thoughts or feelings. My own notebooks usually involve a combination of diary-ish entries and journaling. There’s no right or wrong way to do it– if writing a few simple lines about your daily activities feels right and is satisfying, it’s nothing to feel guilty about. Sometimes these simple little records of our lives may be just as interesting and valuable as multi-page deconstructions of every little thing we felt.
Do read the whole Washington Post article– at age 100, Evie Riski’s joy in a lifetime of notebook-keeping shines through.