I have kept a journal since the second grade, when I started each entry “Dear Diary” and signed them “Love, Jaclyn.” That first diary, a gift from my grandma, was tiny and had little bears on the cover.

Throughout the years, I have always kept written books of my thoughts, though bears haven’t graced their covers in a long time. I love the leather-bound volumes that smell cozy, the gold-lined pages on the one embossed with a quill, the one with the hand-dyed fabric cover.

Recently I read a column in the New York Times where writer Dominique Browning confessed she had recently burned all her diaries, largely to keep the snoops away when she dies.

This action also seemed almost sacrilege. To burn all those pages? All those words? All those thoughts? Especially for someone who reveres a book like a sacred object, this seemed particularly harsh.

It made me wonder: Do many people keep a diary any more? When I asked readers to contact me if they did, I had no idea so many would respond. I received more than 30 emails and phone calls from men and women, young and old, who wanted to tell about what they wrote and why.

A daily log

Jon Pontzius of Columbia City has kept a journal for 25 years. Now 72, he’s not sure what prompted him to start writing as a nearly 50-year-old man.

Pontzius writes daily or weekly in spiral notebooks. He keeps them in a portable container meant for files, spiral-side up. Many have a red marbled cover and are filled, cover to cover, with his black, looping script. Many of the spirals are bent and stuffed with those ribbons that are created when a page is ripped out.

“These are the rattiest-looking diaries you’ve ever seen,” Pontzius says. “But it’s what inside that counts, I guess.”

And what’s inside are doodles and quick drawings of ideas to be turned into sculptures. Pontzius is an artist, and many of his completed works start as a few sloppy lines in the pages of his journal.

There’s also writing, and a lot of it. He details days and people worth remembering – like that time a tornado smashed his pickup while he hid out in a freezer at an Arby’s. One of the few things he was able to salvage from his truck was his journal. He shows me some of the mud splatters on a page, and I can’t help but think how grateful he must be to have saved this piece of history.

I may not be especially proud of the brilliant prose I came up with when I was 14, but I’d never want to lose that piece of myself. Re-reading past journals is something like an immersion into my youth. The college years, like Pontzius’ pages, turned into a scrapbook of sorts as I collected first drafts of poetry and post cards of paintings from art museums.

Pontizius is not sure what he wants to do with his books, but he doesn’t think he’d ever want relatives reading it. He shared a story of a woman he knew who kept a journal. After she got divorced, she started to date a man, and she wrote about the difficulty of balancing that relationship with her 16-year-old daughter. When the daughter read this in her mom’s diary, she ran away.

“I can see where it could make for bad feelings if people close to you read them, and they can take something the wrong way,” he says. “This is why I’m worried about what’s going to happen to my journals eventually. Maybe make copies and give them to a library or someone that doesn’t care what I write about.”

On aging

Rosi Koch kept her first journals in high school, when all she wrote about were what people wore, relationships and who said what about whom.

She pitched those a long time ago.

When she started her family, she started to write about her day-to-day activities – things the family did together, vacations, hijinks her sons got into, like when the two older ones tied the youngest to a tree and left him hanging there. And then did the same to the baby sitter.

Koch writes her entries on a computer and prints them out a few times a year to store in binders. She recently gave her children some of those journals as a keepsake – something to look back on and say, “This is what Mom was thinking, this is what she was going through.”

Today, Koch, 65, from Leo-Cedarville, writes primarily about aging. The header on many of her printed-out journal pages is “An Old Lady’s View of the Aging Process.” More recent entries read, “The Aging Boomer.”

“There’s things about your skin and body that change,” Koch says. “Eyelids droop, you don’t have to shave as much. I used to have hair like a horse, and now it’s so thin. How your thought-process changes. Things that mattered 20 years ago, I look back and think, ‘How stupid.’ ”

Koch wishes she would have talked to her mom more about these sort of topics, the things a woman never thinks to ask while her mom is still around.

She also writes about her wishes for the future, making the journal serve as an unofficial will of sorts, writing about what she wants to happen should she go senile one day or become unable to walk or see.

“I tell them not to send me to Arizona when I’m decrepit, that kind of thing,” Koch says, grinning.

A record of life

Shirley Shiff wrote her first journal entries when she was 11 or 12 years old. Since then – she is now in her 60s – Shiff has filled countless journals.

And she’s seen how her topics of interest have changed – as well as her writing style.

“(In early journals) there was a lot of stuff about boys, which continued for a number of years to men,” says Shiff, of Fort Wayne.

I can relate. It’s almost embarrassing to read what mattered to teenage me – this girl got that girl to be mean to me; that boy won’t go with me to the dance because this other boy told him not to.

When keeping a journal for so many years, noticing that growth from petty concerns to something more meaningful becomes a relief.

“I think they’re deeper and less superficial, less about outside people and more about my internal processing of my feelings of events,” Shiff says.

She handwrites her journals in small letters, and she still has each book. Currently, she favors inexpensive but pretty ones, small, hard-backed and spiral-bound. She shows me one with a blue cover and a bouquet of pretty raised flowers, and she laughs as she points out a quote on the first page: “What you think of me is none of my business.”

I see the phrase as a word of warning, a “reader beware” sort of thing. Shiff has, in fact, dealt with a snooper before: her ex-husband, before they were divorced. He was looking for evidence of an affair that was not happening, she says. He didn’t find what he was looking for.

As a clinical psychologist, Shiff recommends journaling to some of her patients. Called bibliotherapy, the act of writing down feelings and emotions can help a person deal with those feelings and emotions.

“If you can say (something) on paper, it helps reduce the anger,” she says. “With depression, it helps them express the sadness and get a lot of that out of their system.”

jyouhana@jg.net