Sana Riaz, of Philip G. Vroom School, — like many Bayonne students – got involved with the Bayonne Cleaner and Greener program to help make the environment a little better. Although some students would enter an essay contest on the oddest things they found, she wasn’t thinking of the contest when she saw the notebook lying on the ground in Stephen Gregg County Park.
“According to Webster’s Dictionary,” she later wrote, “trash is junk that is worth little or nothing.”
But not in the case. For inside the book, she found expressions of feeling through writing to which she was as a teenager able to connect.
“There were poems showing the writer’s moods, excerpts from this person’s life and many other interesting adventures,” she wrote in a later essay.
“The diary was lying near one of benches,” she said during a recent interview. “It had poetry and talked about this person’s life. It even had dreams in it.”
She said this gave her insight into someone’s dream world which she described as an amazing journey.
“Some of the dreams sounded so strange to me that I couldn’t believe anyone had dreamt them,” she later wrote. “As I read the dream entries, I began to recognize a true writer and a unique dream theme.”
Riaz said journal writing gives power to see inside ourselves.
“It’s impossible to remember your life events accurately because you are a different person later in life,” she wrote. “Journals capture moments in time and include memories not even a camera can capture.”
Jane Campion, of one of Riaz’s teachers, said Riaz was someone with great writing talent, so that this contact through words was a strange communication between talented beings who would not otherwise meet.
“Reading this person’s diary was like living someone’s life,” Riaz said. “It was reading what happens to a teenage boy.”
This includes the usual problems that teens face, struggles with confidence, and other issues that Riaz recognized.
“He wrote about getting made over friends,” she said.
Born in New York, but raised in Bayonne, Riaz has aspirations of becoming a heart surgeon and will enter an honors biology program at Bayonne High School in September. She got this idea after she won the Hudson County Science Fair in 2004 for her study of the heart.
Teachers said she volunteered for everything, and that she had been involved in the Bayonne Cleaner & Greener program previously.
Judy Bouton, the Vroom School teacher representative for the Cleaner &Green program, said Riaz might have won the essay contest for the most interesting piece of trash except that she missed the submission deadline.
In some ways, however, her finding the diary was only fitting, Bouton claimed.
“She is a fabulous writer,” Bouton claimed, noting that others have frequently found odd items in these cleanups including microwave ovens and such things, but no one ever found anything like this.
Anna Panayiotou, founder of the Bayonne Cleaner & Greener program, called this an amazing find.
Contact Al Sullivan at asullivan@hudsonreporter.com