THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 28, 1995 TAG: 9509280382
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Charlise Lyles
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Dear Diary,
I hope you don't get upset about this. But I'm going to have to make a few corrections.
I know. I know. This is a first in the more than two decades that I've written to you. And I hope all this erasing that I'm about to do doesn't make you feel violated - all those itchy eraser crumbs down your spine.
I may have to tear out whole pages to set the record straight. I'll be gentle.
What prompts all this? There's a guy in Washington who has gotten himself into a world of trouble for inaccurate journal entries. He has had to give up his job and everything because of them.
This fella, whom I've probably never mentioned to you before, once went by the name of Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore. Very shortly, however, folks'll just be calling him Bob.
Who would've thought that I would have something in common with a bland, conservative, Washington-based, national-leader type, white guy. Here I am, a fun-loving, liberal, small-town, reporter-type sister-girl.
Yet, turns out we share a slavish, perhaps foolish, commitment to recording every ounce of truth about our lives in journals. Except for these corrections.
Oh, the ties that bind.
I better get busy with those corrections.
Let's start with that entry I made when I was 12 or 13 about a group of older boys who used to fondle me regularly.
On my way home from junior high almost every day, I walked down a deep, dim, cinder-block hallway to get to my family's apartment. That's where I encountered their laughing hands grabbing at my breasts and behind. They knocked my school books in a puddle of pee and kept on gleefully squeezing and pumping fingers tipped with dirty nails.
By the way, dear Diary, the corrections that Packwood guy had to make in his dear diary have to do with a like matter: male domination and violation of female boundaries.
Only, he had to clear up that he, in fact, did not behave like the boys in the hallway, although his journal pages suggested otherwise to the Senate Ethics Committee.
Actually in his case it wasn't a matter of molestation but of conquest. But you know, dear Diary, surely his victims feel like I did - assaulted.
That's if his journal entries had been true. But since it turns out they are inaccurate, it naturally follows that the women who worked for this Packwood guy and claimed that he kissed, stroked and poked more liberally than he ever voted, didn't really feel violated or humiliated, their self-esteem annihilated.
My, what a little deletion can do!
Now, back to that little entry oh so many years ago from the corridors where this girl grew up. Well, I'm ready now to erase it all.
The violation. The humiliation. The self-esteem annihilation. All of it, eraser crumbs. Never happened.
Only, dear Diary, I find that my rubbery eraser fails me because, for all these years, I've scribbled my secrets to you in ink. by CNB