Before blogging, there were proto-bloggers, and I have encountered another example: Rose Kennedy.

I have commemorated proto-bloggers before. For example, something John Keats did in 1816. And, in the first year of my own blogging, I told you about my grandfather, Pop. And though I can’t find where I've blogged about it, there's something I myself used to do in the 1990s. I'd read the paper NYT at the dining table in the morning and if I found something distinctly interesting, I'd tear it out and put it on the other side of the table, where my sons would see it when they eventually came into the room.

Anyway, the proto-blogger I discovered today was Rose Kennedy. As a consequence of reading that Rebecca Traister article about RFK Jr. — blogged here — I started reading his book "American Values/Lessons I Learned from My Family." 

Here's what I consider to be like blogging:

An incessant walker, [my grandmother Rose] urged us to never go to bed without a twenty-minute after-dinner stroll. Her own evening rambles covered a good two miles, even in her late eighties, and she didn’t reserve them just for that time of day. She walked regardless of pouring rain or blazing sun. My cousin-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger once wrote that he “was quite shocked at how much walking she did and how the family always rotated who would go on walks with her.” To preserve ourselves from exhaustion, we each took hourlong shifts as she meandered around Hyannisport’s seaside golf course, or on the towpath along Lake Worth in Palm Beach, or on the sandy shores of Nantucket Sound. In preparation for these promenades she pinned to her sweater snatches of poetry, clippings from the morning papers, and noteworthy quotations or passages from books she was reading. As we walked she might depart from this syllabus to ask about our own reading, or to talk about our family and its history. 

Pinned to her sweater! She was a walking blog!

Let me give you one more thing about Rose from that book:

Grandma... wanted to know all about our opinions and ambitions, our clothes and our hobbies. What were we reading? What were we studying at school? What subjects did we discuss with our friends? She listened to Bob Dylan and read the poems of Rod McKuen....  One night we told Grandma we were headed for a Rolling Stones concert at the Cape Cod Coliseum. She must have mulled it over before deciding to witness the spectacle herself. She came alone, but word of her presence rippled through the Coliseum as she searched for her seat, and the young audience rose spontaneously to greet her with a long ovation. That gesture touched her deeply. There were, however, limits to her embrace of the cultural revolution. She drew that line at the musical Hair, telling an interviewer, “I can see plenty of naked bodies in my own basement when people are changing into their swimsuits.” 

Personal dignity was high on Grandma’s list of priorities. She once scolded Tom Brokaw for drinking in her theater, and I still recall her ferocious scowl when my sister Courtney’s boyfriend, Dan Dibble, stripped off his shirt to expose a giant rose tattoo while performing a rendition of Dion’s “The Wanderer” for Grandma’s ninety-fifth birthday party. I suspected that, had she been able to leave her wheelchair, there wouldn’t have been a coat hanger left in the closet, nor an unviolated strip of flesh on Dan’s body.