The Agenda

What do today’s girls know about the 70s / 80s agenda? And I’m not talking about the Smemoranda or the Moleskine or some multicolored little book on which today’s young people write down thoughts or appointments, assuming that someone still doesn’t use a cell phone. I’m talking about the “agenda” concept of the 70s / 80s.

There were various brands, such as the tender one of Holly Hobbie, but, for the most part, they were common adress books with an unattractive appearance within which, however, you built a world. The more space free of figures or writings they offered, the better.

The original function would have been to write down homework but, in reality, we wrote about everything. First, the secret diary which, as you will see, was not secret. So phrases, mottos, song lyrics, cards, stickers, photo clippings of actors and singers. Woe to telling lies, the agenda was the magic mirror to which each of us entrusted our soul and existence, true, strong and uncontaminated! It was, in short, partly similar to, and partly much more than, a social profile.

And the agenda, little by little, day after day, was colored, grew, overflowed, swollen with train, concerts, cinemas and theaters tickets, with songs and poems, between Leopardi and Renato Zero, with human figures who reanimated upon rereading and came back to life: the now deceased teacher of Italian, the teacher of Latin, the terrible teacher of English, the silly and womanizer professor of philosophy. And then companions, parties, friendships, loves, first kisses, disappointments, quarrels and reconciliation.

The agenda always came with us, at friends’ homes, on vacation, at the beach, at school. During class hours, the diaries were exchanged under the counter, so that you could read what your partner had written and you could insert a piece of our own, the equivalent of a comment to a post today. It was a way to communicate, to let your best friend know that thing that you hadn’t been able to say verbally, to apologize, to reaffirm an affection or to confess a love or a sin of envy or jealousy.

I, I admit, have never stopped. I still have the habit. I started writing the agenda when I was seventeen and — with only brief interruptions in periods of particular depression (and here we understand the therapeutic value of the agenda) — I have continued to this day. In the cellar I have boxes full of them, divided by year, about forty volumes that someone one day, after my departure, will throw away without even opening them.

Now I just write down the things that happen and what I do. The style is flat and accountant in comparison to the liveliness of those early school years writings. During adolescence, one is creative, inventing nicknames and striking jokes, coining expressions and neologisms, a jargon to be shared only with close friends. It is the difference between being twenty and being sixty, it is the difference between bubbling with life — keeping an eye open, compassionate and moved — and understanding, instead, that all the games are now over, that life can only be endured and not molded.

What a thrill the agenda! It was a way of saying “I exist, I am here and I have a soul”, it was comfort and refuge, relief and fun, tears and laughter.

Those years, that enthusiasm, that feeling that everything was still possible, will never come back. Now you need to know how to make the best of a bad situation, feel part of life as it is, appreciating its beauty and enjoying the little things. (Maybe even writing them down on the agenda, why not?)