Throughout most of those years, I journaled off and on. Crafting random thoughts, dreams, fears and desires into readable form, whether with a pencil or keyboard, seemed to also provide a welcome, alternative perspective.
At 14, I started keeping my first detailed diary, a secret book I carefully hid beneath the heavy mattress of my single bed. My inspiration came from my friend Janny, a classmate who, like me, weathered the usual teenage traumas and dramas by writing about her innermost thoughts, opinions, fears, dreams and hopes. She encouraged me to do the same. So I saved my pennies and bought a little blank book at the local drug store.
I shared a small bedroom with my little sister, whose bed was a few feet from mine. I could tell when she fell asleep because she was a teeth grinder. Those strange sounds were my cue to pull out my tiny book and, pen in hand, laboriously recount the day's sufferings. My laundry list of woes usually included descriptions of secret crushes that went unnoticed, piteous longing for stylish clothes instead of hand-me-downs, wishes for professional haircuts that weren't executed with sewing shears in my mom’s kitchen, or figuring out how to earn enough pocket change so I could join my friends at the movie theater or the bowling alley. Oh, and how to stop Hilary from grinding her teeth; geez, she was only five!
I felt my secrets were safe as long as no one found that diary. But I always worried that someone might stumble across it, and expose my secrets. That is, until the day Janny and I invented a secret code. We had study hall together each day, but there was a “no talking” rule in force, so when we needed to communicate, we passed notes. These were sometimes intercepted—mostly by dreadful teenage boys, who wadded them up and used them for spitballs; but also by the college-age hall monitor, who had the power to discipline us. So Janny and I devised the code to thwart future discovery or humiliation.
Fifty years later, at a small class reunion, Janny and I put together what we could remember of that code. We did it mostly to satisfy the curiosity of a few of our old classmates, who after all those decades were still trying to break it. The reconstruction process took very little time. I think we pulled it out of our brains in under two hours…no dementia here!
It was simpler than I had once thought—what seemed unbreakable at 14, appeared to be child’s play at 64. Unlike cuneiform, the code is based on what we moderns know as the Latin (or Roman) alphabet. Some of our letters closely resemble the old Roman cursive…not that we were trying to do that. So, now that I don’t need to protect my precious teenage secrets, I’ll let my friends decide whether it was encryption worthy. Comments welcome.
