Your Family's Antique Media a.k.a. Journals

The modern condition is a scam. Leafing through your family’s antique media makes every subsequent moment spent clicking through social media feel like saccharine connectivity, a feast of empty calories. We should smash our computers and throw our phones into the ocean, then open every cardboard box in every attic on earth and read whatever falls out.

I haven’t finished reading {my grandmother’s} diaries; I don’t want to be done. But my favorite passage so far ­— the one that finally made me cry — was this, recorded in a moment’s happy aftermath and left as an unwitting legacy: It was a Monday evening in 1911, near the end of summer. My grandmother was sitting on the porch with friends after dining on egg sandwiches, pickles and peaches and cream (“delicious”). A neighbor started playing a hand organ. The music was irresistible: The girls “flew” across the street to listen, and when the neighbor started up with “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey,” something magical happened: “We all began to dance — right on the street. The people on the corner were dancing on their porch, and we couldn’t help ourselves.”

Eventually the dancers stood still in the evening air to catch their breath. “We all felt so sweet and nice.”

And then, just when my teenage grandmother thought things couldn’t get any sweeter, Harvey walked by.

From “Grandma’s Teenage Diaries” by David Rees for the New York Times Magazine, 2016; Photo by Jen Davis

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