I was sipping espresso at the cafe and perusing Don Marquis’s Archie and Mehitabel.  Archie is a cockroach who types verse in the newsroom late at night by jumping on one typewriter key at a time. He often writes about his friend Mehitabel the alley cat, who believes she is the reincarnation of Cleopatra.   

It’s the kind of thing our friends’ fathers used to read for amusement.  They also read Pogo. A different generation.

Anyway, I decided to write in my diary instead.

You may think, No, that’s ridiculous.  You write a diary in private, not at the cafe.  Then you hide it under the bed.

No, that’s what you do when you’re spying.  Ha ha ha!  You can’t be a spy unless you know ALL the etiquette of every embassy of the capitals of Europe and Asia. You have to know which forks to use.  Also you have to know codes. 

I often write in my diary in public. I take notes on the weather, I copy overheard dialogue, I keep track of the ongoing Scrabble game at the cafe, I intervene when they argue about the legitimacy of FOMO as a word.  “That’s an acronym!” 

Many years ago a burglar took interest in my diary.  After he/she burgled my apartment, I was more upset about the missing VCR than the stolen diary. The VCR took hours to set up. The diary?  Not my favorite volume. I suppose the burglar took it as a memento. 

Heavens, I used to write in my diary while the students took exams.  Fortunately, nobody stole it as a prank.  They weren’t interested in handwritten objects: they wrote on computers or phones,  including “journaling” for English class (when did the noun “journal” become a gerund?).

The problem is:  where IS my diary?  It’s in my bag.  I take everything out of my purse:  comb, brush, barrettes, a paperback by Simone de Bearuvoir, a piece of fruit, and a half-unwrapped cough drop sticking to a bookmark.

All right.  It’s at the bottom of the bag. It’s a Top Secret Diary only I didn’t know it.

EXCERPT FROM DIARY:  OVERHEARD DIALOGUE, FEB. 9, 2025 

A loud whisper from a young woman:  “She’s so old.  She’s very fat.”

Middle-aged woman with a sense of humor: “This is America!  I can be fat if I choose.  Health is the thing….  And no, I’m not old yet;  I’ll let you know.”

Okay.  It’s not the Crito. It’s not even G. K. Chesterton. 

The problem is that I can’t find a pencil or pen.

I ask the Scrabblers, “Does anyone have a pen?”

Nobody has a pen, a pencil, even a crayon.

This is what it’s like to live in America in the twenty-first century.  Everybody has a diary, but nobody has a pen.