An accounting
I've been posting entries from my great grandfather's journal (gathered here). I rescued the journals from a moldy trunk and they cover a variety of years - I am working on 1934, 1935, 1936 and 1937 right now. Here is a scan from the page where he summarized car expenses for 1936.
Some years ago, while I was doing some volunteer work for the town I live in, we were taken on a tour of a downtown bank building that had just been bought to be used for our city hall. (No strange irony there I suppose..).
The building was under "deconstruction" - furniture removed or destroyed, walls partially down, dust and debris everywhere. I wandered into one small room that had a pile of ledgers in the center of the floor. Turned out to be old tax ledgers from the '50s. I managed to find the entry for the house I live in. Suddenly the house had a history and a firm place in both past and present.
These entries reminded me of that....
- J.
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I remember him as a very old man. He was in his 90's when I knew him. He would either be in his chair smoking a pipe with a stack of books next to him or out in the garden behind the house, puttering around. I remember watching him, having been told that he taught himself everything: gardening, winemaking, Shakespeare, philosophy. . .everything. The journals add so much context to those memories.
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