We are all walking storybooks. Write it down, even if it’s just a list. One memory bleeds into another. Keep a journal. You’ll be amazed when you look back at what you wrote. I bought my first simple spiral-bound notebook after I read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. Unfortunately, my journaling has slowed down a bit, but I filled 70 notebooks before that happened.
Here’s another excerpt from a memoir I started in 1997 at Grub St. - the year that Boston writing institution was founded! to read another excerpt, go to Memoir in the Drawer.
I got married four days short of my twenty-first birthday and by the time I was twenty eight, I had three children and felt about one hundred. I thought that was plenty of kids until my dad died.
My father surprised us all and just didn't get out of his bed one morning. He was 70 but he didn't look like 70 and he didn't act like 70 so he just tricked us all.
I haven’t drawn a portrait in an age - always a struggle to get a likeness, but you know when you get there!! More on that some day.
I got a call that Sunday morning, I think it was from my older sister Sheila, but to tell you the truth I can't really remember. I hung up the phone and we all went right along to church, as though nothing had happened. I sat through an hour's worth of service, then to The Coffee Hour, then to a kind of let's-talk-about-life kind of group that my husband had started.
I sat there, on the tweedy couch and told the group my father had died and everybody said they were very sorry and all the while my father still lay in his bed, getting colder every minute. I hate stuff like that, when you wonder now, "What the HELL was I doing?" and you can give yourself all the reasons why you didn't hop in the car and drive the 45 minutes to see your father dead in his bed, just to touch him and see him before they took him away, but it doesn't matter how many reasons you have. You didn't do it and it's too late now. It's a good idea just not to think about it too much.
My father's death was like someone had shut out the lights. What the hell kind of fun were we ever going to have any more if he didn't show up? It just seemed like one of his jokes. I sat at his funeral and cried...for him, for me. I had arranged to have a string trio play, up in the church loft. I needed to have a violin playing at dad's funeral, as a tribute to all those years of his pulling out his violin for Christmas carols. I sat there and understood that, when all is said and done, the only thing that really makes any difference in our lives is the people we have loved. I sat in that church and wept--probably for the first time in my life. No, now that I think of it, it was the second. The first was when my husband's father died and I got my first glimpse of loss. I ambushed my mother in her kitchen and blubbered something about what was I going to do when either of them died? She took me in her arms and rocked me. Standing. She rocked me for a long time, until I had to give up because I couldn't stand anymore. My mother and I had never said I love you to each other. I’m not sure if we actually said it then. It was all too risky.
My husband was totally aghast at the thought of a fourth child. After all, he had been an only child and felt he was doing marvelously adjusting to what we had so far. But I was overcome by emptiness, groping around to turn the lights back on and gathered up by that velvety mist which occasionally overtakes women, where they have to feel life stirring in their loins or they're going to ache themselves to death. I spent my nighttimes dreaming about being in the hospital and basking in joy as my family visited me and the new baby. Women get irrational in these states.
Then I began to really think about it, and to think about the fact that I was 33 and that my last child was entering first grade and that having a baby wasn't going to bring my father back. And what if anything went wrong and the new baby was sick just like my little brother Michael had been and besides there would be a large space of years between the baby and the rest of the kids, just like Mike, and I might be just too old and too tired to cope, just like my mother and it really wouldn't be worth it, just for one great moment at the hospital when everyone would visit and hold the new baby. So, I was just going through all of this in my head and deciding that if I did it at all, I shouldn't have just one baby, I should have two, so that baby would never be all lonely like Michael became and then I thought about how old and tired I'd be and decided to just skip the whole thing, when Arthur woke up one day and said he loved the idea of a new baby. So, I was in the middle of deciding and asking everyone I talked to, even mild acquaintances, what they thought, when my period never came. I felt pretty depressed actually, because I had now decided I was going to turn into an old woman overnight and that this baby would be doomed to a miserable lonely life and how could I possibly walk, so stupidly, into repeating history. Our solution was to tell the kids, even though it was early, just so I could get some of the good parts, more like the visiting in the hospital and holding the new baby part. We started a little chart of how big the baby was (an eighth of an inch) and whether it had grown ears yet, which I was sure it wasn't going to, because it was going to be born with no ears and one finger and its growth would be severely stunted because of all the bourbon I drank at the Brookwood school faculty parties and I'd have to carry it around in a basket for 20 years until it would become a famous philosopher, but that was all going to take so much energy on my part and I wasn't sure I could manage it.
Olivia, by the way, was born with all her parts and treated like a queen from the day she arrived. The hospital scene was as good as I had imagined.
I leave you with a little stop-motion video I made several years ago. I have no idea how I did it. I’m trying to dust off those skills. So fun to run several drawings together!
Keep flying!
You have the stories and the creativity to tell them like no other! Very fascinating and fun.
Fabulous weaving the layers of your story!
Thanks Kate