In January 2011, I wrote my first entry in a five-year diary. It seems I watched “No Country for Old Men” and had “anxiety over … board meeting.” I don’t remember the details of that meeting, but I remember the anxiety.

Five years later I started another five-year diary on New Year’s Day, which began with a bang — literally. “Wake late to sound [of] car crash.” Someone had rear-ended a parked car across the street, pushing it into the back of the car belonging to my son’s friend (no one was hurt). Later that day we went on a two-hour hike in the woods near Mahwah, New Jersey.

This week, I finished my third five-year diary — the latest installment in what is now a 15-year record of the often mundane, sometimes meaningful and occasionally dramatic moments of my middle age. On New Year’s Day I started my fourth diary, which will take me well into — oh, let’s just say what my father would say when someone complained that they were getting older: “Consider the alternative.”

I started keeping the diaries on a whim. It was a milestone birthday year, and I suppose my thoughts had begun to turn to the parts of my life I’d already lost, either through the death of loved ones or as a result of my own crumbling or highly selective memory. Like most parents (especially in the pre-Facebook era), I wished I had kept a better record of my kids when they were young. Yes, we took photographs and shot videos (now trapped on 8-millimeter cassettes), but gone are the conversations, the routines, the little things that made us laugh.

There’s not much room for reflection in the tiny spaces allotted in my........

© The Jewish Week