A mundane Monday, and a surprise...

It took me nearly half the day to get started on the 4500 words due for Wednesday (which was augmented by another 1500 or so words for the same time frame before I cleared the decks). In the end, I managed to get halfway to my goal for tomorrow night (if we don't count invoicing).

I brought with me to Texas a couple of folders of my late mother's papers to go through, with the idea that a lot of that process would take place with Natalie in the room. We actually did go through several documents during her visit on Saturday, and the session was quite informative for me as well.

One folder I grabbed seemed to be filled with typed notes for a writing class, along with summaries of course required reading. The folder is of fairly good size, and about halfway through, I thought I had run across some of her writing assignments, when I realized that she had used the back of her old writing assignments (in no particular order, as far as I can see) as the blank surfaces for what appears to be a journal.

Here's a excerpt from January 11, 1942:

I don't sing any more. I just while away my time. I wrote only one story and one play during [1941]. The total sum of reading was a few murder mysteries. And the keynote of the whole situation is that I'm fed up with the kind of life I'm leading. It's stagnant! And slowly, slowly I see myself sinking deeper and deeper into a do-nothing state. I can't seem to fight. To regain that energy that I had once (or am I fooling myself: did I actually ever have it?)

[...]

I am in love with the study of language. Words, words, words. If I could only learn to manipulate with them. Hence my morbid study of the technique of the mystery novel.

I still can't master shorthand. I can't. I hate it. And deciphering my hieroglyphics is nauseating.

C. is a problem as far as my social aspirations go. She can't keep her feet straight, but must hold her toes pointing toward each other, as if indicating her background. I can't find enough people with background.

[...]

I get mad sometimes - horribly angry. I want to get away. I must get away somehow. I can't stand it any longer. Living here all my life, that would drive me nuts.

In among the typed pages was a handwritten letter to my mother from my grandfather, dated no more than three months before he died. It is a perfectly ordinary letter, wherein he explains the concept of cost per square foot of housing, and that an "asking price" is exactly that and not etched in stone. In a postscript, he cautions my mother not to be surprised if someone calls to announce that she or I or my father had won a television set from some store, as he had filled out entries for the three of us and dropped them into the store's drawing box.

I'm pretty sure none of them was the winning entry.

I shall have to start cataloging these papers, methinks.

Cheers...