Its front cover is taped, the spiral no longer attached. The back cover is awash in phone numbers, random jottings it seems, area codes from all over the country.
In between, the pages are dog-eared, some torn, some scribbled with pencil in the unruly hand of a child. Every once in a while there is a crisp typed letter pasted onto a page or simply tucked inside.
Each entry is dated, the dates sometimes as long as three years apart. The handwriting shifts from soft and slanted to straight upright and strong to suddenly a child’s in a script so earnestly pressed onto the page you can picture the little tongue straining hard against lips.
The entries come from Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Connecticut, rural New Mexico and Albuquerque too. In a digitally drenched world, it is a conversation on paper, life told not in news blips but in essays that go on for pages at a time. Scribblings in the margins are the sassy asides that otherwise might have been whispered across the dinner table.
They are letters from five sisters and their mother, and for 10 years, these women have been bound as much by their spiral notebooks as are any siblings by the phone calls and plane flights that form the connective tissue of the modern American family.
They call the notebooks, variously, “the journal” or “the book,” though in fact the spirals now number four. The latest edition currently lingers in Lake View, where baby sister Katie Merrell, a 41-year-old health policy analyst at the University of Chicago, has been harboring it for, um, a little longer than she cares to admit. The three other spirals are safe in the clutches of mom Peg Merrell in her Albuquerque home. And though the journal itself–especially Volume 4–is falling apart, it is the glue for the Merrell sisters and their mother.
“It gives me time to think about news I’d heard but didn’t attend to. Reading at my leisure, rather than hearing it on the phone, it’s a chance to revisit its implications,” said Katie Merrell. “I also think it solves the problem of relying on my mom as the news center. Sometimes we’d get frustrated at her distortions. This takes her off the hook.
“I like that I see my sisters’ handwriting. I like that my kids, at 2, put their stickers in it. I like that one of my nieces pretended her dog wrote on it, things that can’t happen in e-mail. I love that my dad writes. Every one of his letters to us when we were in college was a handwritten bulleted list.
” `Great talking to you.
” `Enclosed is the check for books.
” `See you at Christmas.
” `Love, Dad.'”
It all started in 1992, when one of Katie’s sisters heard about the idea from a friend, picked up a shocking-pink spiral notebook and, in a breezy one-page preface, laid out the premise, then mailed it off to Katie, then living in Boston. (The Merrell sisters count among themselves a lawyer, a teacher, an occupational therapist and a Wall Street financial type.)
Katie, now the mother of two but then the only sister without kids, was thought to be the best bet for jotting and mailing it along. “Besides,” said Peg, a 75-year-old retired schoolteacher and editor at the University of New Mexico, “she can’t leave anything unanswered.”
The first journal zipped around the country, collecting entries at every stop, filling in nine months, a record that hasn’t been beaten. It was unanimously decided that Peg Merrell would be the archivist, the keeper of the spirals.
“She was the only one to be trusted,” quipped Katie, who is one of two sisters with a propensity for, oops, letting it linger in long-overlooked places.
Whenever the big brown envelope lands in the mailbox, the response from Katie is: “Oh?” Followed by: “Oh!” It’s usually as she’s walking in from work that she spies the big envelope, and then, more often than not, she slips into irresponsible mode, ignoring the dinner she’s supposed to be cooking, pretty much blocking out everything but the pages in front of her.
“I just read it. I don’t talk to anybody, I ignore everybody and then I either write right away and forget to mail it for a really long time or put it down and forget to write in it for a really long time. I never don’t read it right away.”
It has turned up months later in one sister’s medical files, in another’s Christmas card stack and most often at the bottom of the piles next to someone’s bed. Volume 4 has been in circulation for eight years, but only because it keeps getting lost.
Peg Merrell, archivist, reports that Volume 2, unlocated for years, is safe at last in the archives but only one-third full. “Whoever had it was conscious of having it but couldn’t think of where she’d put it.”
The vaguely guilty party finally decided to go out and get a replacement, thus launching Volume 3 before its predecessor was ever unearthed.
“It’s like reading a bunch of old letters,” said the mother of the Merrell girls. “In this day and age we hardly ever send letters. There’s no way of remembering what you said on the phone eight years, 12 years, 30 years ago. It’s followed people’s moves and home repairs and particularly the state of their children.”
You read of timed labor contractions and toddler queries (“How did the moon get in the tree? … Look, it’s coming home with us!”), only to turn pages to read of the same children abandoning piano lessons and conquering Elizabethan history while studying in London.
“It’s a commitment, really,” Peg Merrell continued. “It’s a commitment to recording your ideas, your feelings. None of us is given to telling the girls at bridge club all about our children or our husbands.
“You can tell by their handwriting how upset they are or how much of a hurry they’re in. And it’s something”–here the mother of the bunch took a long pause–“they’ll have to decide who gets possession. I should will them to someone.” She chuckled before adding: “Not someone who’s always losing them.”
