Hauling Secrets

So we’re cleaning out a bunch of renovation debris that’s been piled into a big barn-looking three-car garage. Our client just bought this charming old farmhouse and she’s gutting it. When we finish the bottom, she tells us to go ahead and empty the top level of the garage too. The only thing up there besides a bunch of pieces of wood and raccoon shit are two old boxes stuffed into a corner. Of course, I open them quickly before picking them up.

Inside are a bunch of old books, the kind a seasoned collector can tell you are worthless – old Readers Digest collections, popular paperbacks, etc. But there among them is one that stands out with its shiny silk-woven Chinese-landscape-style cover…

I tuck it into my pocket and forget about it until I get home that day and start to take my pants off. Turns out it’s not really a book at all, but a diary. The diary of a young girl making the awkward transition from Middle to High School in the year 1979. It even has a title on the first page, written in careful cursive script: “The Diary of a Young Girl – Mary Clark [we’ll call her], Volume III, December 1979.” I couldn’t make this shit up. Just as if she expected a stranger to find it twenty five years later:

The weight of this discovery is beginning to set in. Each right-hand page is bordered with orange or pink-colored foliage from some bonsai-looking tree in a mountain setting, each left hand page with some sunflower-looking things pointing up to a sun shining down from the top:

Flip to the back and you see that it actually is made in Shanghai, with a little graphic of a student sitting at a desk and a stamp reading “Bowman Trading, New York.”

Okay, so this is already a decent find. But then comes the kicker. You have to read the first entry for yourself:

December 24, 1979
Isn’t this a pretty little diary? Lorrie got it for me for Christmas. I just got back from the Jones’s house. Every year I go there and every year I just end up feeling really uncomfortable and leaving after about five minutes. I was hoping I would meet someone new there but I didn’t so I really don’t have anything to write about. Whenever I go to a party or some kind of social gathering I hope I’ll meet a guy there but I never do. It’s so depressing. Oh well, that’s life. Mike also doesn’t even like me anymore. For a while there he liked Nicole and then he seemed to like me again, but now I don’t know, he doesn’t talk to me much any more. I suppose it may be because we hadn’t had fifth or sixth hours for a while because of all our assemblies we had. Martha says we make a cute couple and she doesn’t even know that I like him. Even when we had fifth hour last week he didn’t talk much to me. I’m so bummed. It seems like I’ll never get a boyfriend. Oh well, I shouldn’t be depressed on Christmas Eve. It is nice, however, to write all this stuff down, you know, to get it off my chest. Before, when Mike liked Nicole, I would tell Trudy about it because she doesn’t go to North Oak so I don’t feel so embarassed telling her all these things. Any way, I really like this diary. I’m going to have to keep it up. Maybe I’ll name it and write like letters, you know, “Dear Diary.” That would make it interesting. (Yeah, man, how thrilling can you get.) I’ll name it Lee Chin because it’s Chinese. Isn’t that clever of me. So any ways, “Good night Lee Chin babes, I’ll catch you later.”

That’s right. “Dear Lee Chin.” Stay tuned for excerpts from the diary, as we follow Mary through many hallmarks of adolescence including first love, school, gossip, and gymnastics class, all illustrated with quotes from popular songs of 1979-1981 and peppered with the kinds of catch phrases teenagers of that period apparently used.