diminutive memory

Someone called me darling.

This was not the "sugar," "honey," or "darling" of a saccharine sweet waitress in a diner.  This was, "I miss you, darling."  It was one of those statements that can do a heart good coming from lips that matter.

And then I was transported.

Flash to a page of pale yellow, lined paper.  Paper in a book with a drawing of a patchwork girl on the front.  Think Holly Hobbie in gilt and you'll have an idea of this mid-1970's image.  A book with a small antique-brass lock on the side.  A book containing many of my childhood memories.  A book known as "diary".  It was given to me around my 11th year.  I was, at best, a sporadic recorder of memories.  But still, this book records anger with my parents, irritation with my brother, injury at the hands of "friends" and thoughts about boys.  A read through some of those pages is a blush-inducing torment of childish crushes.  This book is the only way I know that the appellation "boy crazy" applied to me at one point in my history.

That book resides somewhere in this new home.  I just can't lay my hands on it right now to see the true contents of the specific page that spurred this "darling" memory.  But I remember the page, I can see that girlish scrawl, with the word darling (or at least a verisimilitude of the word as written by a less than stellar 11 year-old speller).  You see, I think I can remember the page so clearly because it said, "dahrling".

When I type it that way...dahrling...I can hear some old-timey movie star (think one of the Gabor sisters) saying, "Would you be a daaaaahrling and bring me something cool to drink?"  But at 11,  I wasn't channeling one of the Gabors.  I was just a dismal speller.

So why was an 11 year-old recording the word darling in her diary?  Because she was reading The Diary of Anne Frank.  In one of Anne's entries, Peter asks Anne for a kiss.  She apparently refused but when she writes about it, she calls him a "darling".  I remember thinking this was such a racy scene.  I suppose it was one of the first kisses I ever read about.* (And there wasn't even an actual kiss!) However, I was moved enough by the literary description to write about it in my own diary and record that I hoped someday someone would call me "darling". . . okay . . . "darhling", but can we just forget about the horrendous spelling?**

(Photo of Anne Frank's last house, from here.)

Flash forward 44 years.  Someone has called me darling.  It's nice to know that girlish dreams still can come true.
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*Although it wouldn't be long after this that I started "borrowing" my mother's books and clandestinely checking out books from the library with real kisses.

**Please don't ask why I didn't just look in the book to see how it was spelled.  Sigh.  Apparently, I was boy-crazy and lazy.