AUSTIN, Texas, May 29, 2005 — There are lots of good things about an online journal. It's open to anyone. So interesting like-minded people may show up. Old friends can catch up with you, too. (Although that has a downside when they get all the LB they want without me getting their on-going stories.)

There are two major problems with the open journal, though. You can get comments or e-mail you don't really care to have giving you advice or pronoucing on your life. And you can receive visitors who essentially stumble onto the property and take what they want.

The current month's comments have the former: this anonymous kind of comment pronouncing me sad and misguided. That's like grafitti on your walls. It's my place. And, yes, I can delete comments if I wish to do it. But who would believe that someone says the Visible Woman 'ushers her parents on to death' if I scrubbed off their submission?

The people who stumble in are, in a way, sadder. They are searching for pictures of greasy food or the number of calories in Mentos. Or they misspell something the same way I did in some typo and swoosh, they are awash in my dull life and silly pictures. Sometimes the shear weight of many hundreds of days of material makes a lucky connection of words on one page. Especially back when I used to have a quote of the day, write down everything I watched, read, ate and drank.

If you really want a picture of Le Petit Zinc or tater tots and you find it, cool. But if you are looking for a recipe or nutrition advice when you type "carrots bananas almonds broccoli" then I'm sad that you ended up in this backwater. It makes me unhappy when people steal my pictures, but don't really take them and host them in their own space. Instead, they point their readers to my space.

Two of the major good things about an daily journal are (1) it imposes a small discipline on an otherwise undisciplined life; (2) it provides a person who seems to forget a lot of details (me) with details of her own life (dates, people, pictures, even the occasional quote). Of course, these things don't necessitate the journal being open to the public or even online.

Of course, mulling over whether to do a journal or indeed what to do with my time in public opens me up to both advice and censure. I have lived my life to get as much freedom as possible. And I can live with the freedom. Embrace it even. But the more freedom you have, the more decisions and, I think, the more responsibility for them.

We get up around eight. I tell myself I'm going to the gym right away. But at 9:30 I'm still at my computer with my first cup of coffee. A pattern, it is. But I guess it's just a time when I feel like thinking and writing. Unfortunately, I guess, this morning is a new wave of pondering the journal and whether it should survive in public.

Time to get some exercise. I've called my dad and he's going to church. He doesn't want to make the trip to Temple with us and FFP's parents. (His older brother is in the same nursing home as FFP's uncle who is having a birthday party there.) It will be slow this afternoon, so I should exercise.

We both get off to the gym. I watch a little French Open, do a little exercise. At home we eat leftovers and salad, shower up. FFP is trying to get a column finished. I proof it for him. We get off to his parents' house and get them in the car. We head up IH35. We get to Temple and drive to the nursing home. I've been here several times to see my uncle so we don't have any trouble finding it although other people say they do. Actually there are quite a few signs.

The birthday party is in a public room and it's full of FFP's relatives. It is a little tedious, but his dad enjoys it. There is much attention on him and his younger brother. I have been 'in the family' long enough that people know me and I know people...cousins and cousin's wives. The politician, the preacher, the ex-Navy man who has let his hair and beard grow and whose wife marvels at mega-churches. There is a sweet red punch, some chips and dip and a huge cake. I think they actually have ninety candles on it. The 90-year-old who uses oxygen enlists help to blow out the candles.

I go down the hall at one point to see about my uncle. FFP's parents declared before we left Austin that they weren't going to stay long. The gals in special care tell me where his room is. The door is closed. I knock a couple of times, then go in. He's sound asleep with a cap sitting lopsided on his head. He seems to sleep a lot. If my dad was along, he'd try to make him get up. I just slip out. There are notes from his granddaughter who visits frequently on a marker board.

When they are ready to go, we head out. It takes a while to get down the hall. People want pictures. They want to show FFP's dad a picture of his brother and his buddies during the war. This nursing home is for soldiers and sailors. Pictures of fresh young soldiers hang over the nameplates of the rooms of the men and women here. A lot of them weren't career military. They were WWII draftees and recruits.

We get the car and get the parents in it. They are afraid it is going to rain. It is as if they think we can't drive back to Austin if it's raining. Suddenly traffic slows to a bare crawl. Must be an accident. We can't see it. We creep along for half an hour or more and finally pass the scene of an apparent accident with a trailer separation. A UHaul is on its side, blocking a couple of lanes. After that we whiz home. A black cloud is off in the west, but no rain.

We get the parents home. We go home, let the dog out. Take a deep breath. It's the kind of event that takes all your energy. You feel old and tired yourself. And FFP and I feel like we also visit our former lives. Lives that were narrow and where a birthday party with punch and cake and seeing some cousins passed for excitement. We wonder aloud what it would be like to be married to someone who didn't understand it. It being the lower class (some would say middle but they'd be wrong) American experience of the '50s and '60s. Many of our cousins have come far away from it. Our lawyer, Forrest's cousin, sat dutifully honoring his uncle. But he grew up one of a dozen children in a two-bedroom house. He didn't graduate high school with his class which he said was a bit of a tradition in his family. In my family, mothers (and one father) got college degrees and taught school. The children became nurses, engineers, architects, programmers. There was more and more money. (Even for the parents who were frugal with their meager earnings.) International travel, nicer homes, expanded horizons, caviar and champagne as it were, enter lives that had been bounded by meager rural and tradesman prospects at one time. A very American story. But if you happened to have money in that post war time, wouldn't your life have been very different? Country clubs, travel, a chance to go away to an acclaimed college. FFP and I are glad we made the same journey. It makes us more patient with our families where those roots are still alive and well.

We are relieved to be in our house and we eat some leftovers and snacks and watch the second half of the Empire Falls movie. It seems it would be very hard to follow without having read the book. FFP and I puzzle over whether changes were made to the story. (The author wrote the screenplay but still there might be changes.)

I try to make it through the Sunday papers. Fail. Go to sleep.