The First Journal
©2024, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved.

The First Journal.

This is about The Original Irwin’s Journal, which was the first in the series of notebooks that began my writer’s journey. That first notebook was a seventh grade English class assignment. So that was the First Journal.

Right?

Wrong.

Okay, that’s harsh. It’s an unfair question, anyway.

Many a story has a story leading up to it. This one is a little unusual...well, for me, perhaps it isn’t. I first wrote this down in a journal I kept about the journal, which I penciled (literally, I didn’t use pens in the notebooks) to mark the tenth anniversary of the Irwin’s Journal series.

Every so often, I wrote, I get out of my typical romantic mood and plunge headlong into a practical frame of mind. In extremely rare instances this practicality is coupled with a desire to break free of some aspect of the past. Hint: It’s usually after I’ve broken up with someone, or been rejected by someone and not even gotten to the point of being able to break up with someone because I hadn’t gone out with them in the first place. The net result may not seem ordinary to you, but for me it’s a downright character reversal: I get the urge to throw out stuff.

My father, coincidentally, got the urge to clean the basement. (I will point out that a complete cleaning of it was left to me and Colleen many years later.) I obliged by making a more than cursory attempt to junk some of my old material from college and from my early days as a computer consultant, which was the means by which I paid for college. About half of the material was old printouts. You never know when you’re going to need them, right? Come on, George, I told myself, who are you kidding? You need to keep these like dogs need to keep fleas. Out they went.

About another third of the material consisted of copies of my college’s newspaper. Having wanted absolutely nothing to do with academic publications after three-plus years of fun and games with my high school newspaper (the last of those years serving as its Editor), I don’t even know how they ended up buried in the basement. But there they were, and out they went.

The remaining one-sixth of the material was the tough part. I was actually getting down to some legitimate nostalgia. There were exams from my Freshman and Sophomore Years of college, along with items from the last semester of high school. Some of it might have been worth keeping, but I noted that the boxes in which they were stored were stuffed to the point of explosion. I separated the paperwork into Keep and Throw Out piles, taking pains to assure that the latter pile was at least twice as large as the former pile. I figured I’d make the effort to at least put a dent in the effluvia down in the catacombs, then hold my breath, grab a large trash bag, and shove it in.

This worked until I came across some of my brother’s old schoolwork.

Now, it would have been extremely practical of me to take the initiative and throw it out for him. Chances are that he would never miss it. (I would have been right.) However, trashing old work is an intensely personal experience, and I didn’t want to offend him. I also didn’t want to end up in the doghouse. (I wouldn’t have. Decades later, it was still where I’d left it.) So I elected to put what could be identified as his in a separate pile. I did give it a quick once over as I did this, and discovered, or perhaps I should say rediscovered, an old creation of his: a diary.

Wait, my brother, a diary?

No, not really.

This particular “diary” was not my brother’s personal and private log. It was actually a fictional account of a journey of some sort—it was either about a drive to the West Coast by a contemporary family or an account of a pioneer family traveling to California to find fame and fortune. What do you mean, that’s a ridiculous juxtaposition of alternatives? Well, when I can’t remember a detail, I really can’t remember a detail. What my brother’s “diary”—if you haven’t already guess, a grammar school assignment—did was unearth a deep memory of what would have been, in theory, my first journal.

I peered under my father’s HO Scale train layout at the five or six boxes of archived material that I hadn’t yet sifted through, and wasn’t likely to get to anytime soon. (I was right.) Somewhere in there, I hoped, was a series of short notes I’d written back in the third grade. A sample looked something like this: Today is October 13, 1971. It rained today so we had lunch inside. In English we learned more about verbs.

Or some such nonsense. I didn’t have the actual Composition Book in which I took down these descriptions so I had to rely on my faulty memory. But I think that what I’ve reproduced, or just made up, above conveys the general idea. And it technically is a journal entry by some definitions.

As I recollect, this was a class experiment, ostensibly to identify the writers in the class, I guess. One wonders how much input a teacher can glean from two or three sentences per day, the first of which was always “Today is [date].” Or maybe the aim was to improve penmanship. If so, no wonder I hated it. If I remember right, trying to come up with even one interesting thing to say every school day was totally impossible. It’s just a fact of life, this third grader decided, that some days are just so intensely nondescript that it’s simply not worth writing about them in a journal. I figured that was about two-thirds of the time, and only that much if one was lucky.

That “first journal,” if you like, died after about a month of this foolishness. Somewhere, there must have been a valid reason for its creation by the teachers and/or administration... but I doubt it. Oh, well, I could say that “it was a major stepping stone to the inception of Irwin’s Journal. To that end, I might not be exaggerating—when I did begin The Original Irwin’s Journal in the seventh grade, I knew exactly what not to make it.

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