Blog No 1 Introduction to my Memoir

Diary and Journals

I grew up in an Amish family on a farm in the Ozarks where we attended school in a one-room school house. My two younger brothers and I and were called the “three little boys.”  When I was nine, a teacher gave me a small five-year diary, with four lines for each year on the same page. Inside the front cover I recorded the date, “March 1954.  From Sallie Martin (teacher).”  I stored the diary for almost two years, and then decided I would begin writing on January 1, 1956. Unfortunately, I missed my planned start on New Year’s day, so I waited another entire year to begin writing on January 1, 1957!  A year to a boy of ten is an eternity. 

This was one of the earliest manifestations of this obsessive-compulsive trait that has served me well during my professional career.  I had a recent discussion with a good friend, an internist, and both of us agreed that some features of OCD―meticulous attention to detail, an enduring sense of responsibility, to name a few―are essential features of the best physicians, whether an internist or surgeon.

I kept this small diary for four years, then I changed over to large notebook format.  At first handwritten, but after we acquired our typewriter (controversial in our Amish family as having a typewriter was not accepted by all Amish) all entries were typewritten and often were multiple pages in length.  These journal entries have been essential to write my memoir, allowing me to write with specificity, including actual dialogue that I wrote down at the time.

Follow me on this blog where I will continue to write about my memoir, that is now in the process of being edited in preparation for publication in 2026.