When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
Where do you keep your diary? Hiding in plain sight? Under your pillow. Mattress? A rock? Do you confess, boast, embroider, lie? Do you confide, testify, take an oath, prepare to tell the whole and nothing? Do you scribble, dribble, doodle? Ballpoint, pencil, fountain pen? Do you write every day or only when you have something beautiful to say? Dear Diary: I can not tell you how bad I feel or how much I need or how lost I am. I can not tell how these pages have saved me.
Dear Diary:
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Betsy Lerner 
Everything I write is my diary. That may be the same as keeping no diary, since how would all the pieces ever be pulled together?
When I was in my second decade I kept an actual diary, in a succession of spiral notebooks of various make and model. I often carried it with me and wrote on the spot. I didn’t confess to everything, but I didn’t lie. I used mostly ballpoint, occasionally pencil. Early on, there were crude drawings of girls, and drawings of the sun and its spots (I had a filtered telescope); later, there were no drawings or doodles or scribbles. Sometimes I wrote every day; other times, when I was too busy, sometimes weeks would go by with no entries. Toward the end of my diary days, I kept it on cassette tape.
My diary was someone to talk to when there was no one else to talk to. It was a virtual someone I could say anything to, an analyst of sorts, though I was too young to know of analysis. And I was on a mission — to record my life and my times, in a way that might be of use to me later. And it was — my diary served as a source for two as yet unpublished novels, a half-dozen published short stories, one published novella, and one published experimental short audio work.
The originals of the diary are now almost all gone. I transcribed them to word processing files — editing along the way, and not transcribing everything — then threw the originals away, except for one I kept for sentimental reasons.
My diary saved me. It saved my life and it made it worth living.
Where the F are you dear diary? I only write in you to vent. I guess life is pretty God-damned good then.
I never lie or embroider, but I do leave out many things.