Memoir in the Drawer

Memory is the treasure and guardian of all things Marcus Tullius Cicero

We are all walking storybooks, memoirists in waiting. We have pictures, familiar sights, smells, tastes, sounds, with the power to transport us to a long ago time. Marcel Proust is not the only guy whose mind went off on a daydream over the taste of a special something.

You can trip out too. Noticing, observing, listening, thinking, is all that is required.

I crossed paths with Eve Bridburg in 1997. She was dreaming up the beginnings of a new writing center. She decided to call it GrubStreet. GrubStreet went on to become a phenomenally successful Boston-based writing center (GrubStreet.org).

I had been studying writing on and off for years, but I had never studied writing. I took a memoir course at Grubstreet in those beginning days. Catcher in the Rye was on the reading list. My first memoir began like this.

•••

I really wonder how my life would have been different if I had read Catcher in the Rye when I was a teenager.  I mean, it might have opened my eyes a little to what a namby-pamby I was, what a grade- grubbing, ass-kissing,  eyes-on-the-prize kind of idiot.  Mrs. Haberman, my seventh grade teacher probably assigned it but I never read ANYTHING, unless it was short. And funny.  I had no idea that Catcher In The Rye was long and funny, so I never gave it a chance.  But Mrs. Haberman, now, there was teacher who made me notice.  If there was any moment in my adolescence when I had a window of opportunity to wake up, it was with Mrs. Haberman.  She was very foreign looking and very sexed up--not like anything I'd ever seen in my family--we were all very Irish, no Irish American--that's very different --and worse, in some ways, and we had no sex at my house.  If we could have just been heads moving around the place with no bodies attached, that would have suited my mother.  Catholics, in general, would just as soon not have  bodies, really.   They're more trouble than they're worth.   You know, all that lust getting in the way of every day life. 

Mrs. Haberman was SOMETHING.  She looked like a gypsy and she wore flowy clothes with her bosom and her rear end kind of swinging free and she wore foundation make up--like if you took a knife and scraped it along her face, you'd pick up a whole knife-full of beige colored gunk, but on her face, it looked glamorous. And she wore lots of eye make up. Every day.  It must have taken her hours to get ready for school.  She had a kind of crookedy face and she treated us like grown ups. She was the first adult I had ever come across who treated kids like they were worth something--like she was really interested in what they had to say.  There was a group of kids who hung around her, who acted more grown-up, who had ideas of their own, who probably had fights with their mothers.  

Mrs. Haberman scared me.  She made me nervous. I spent the whole year making fun of her.  I was always the funny one in the class and she just somehow brought it all out in me for all the wrong reasons.  I'd act all  innocent when she asked me a question, like I didn't understand, I'd walk  behind her and imitate her swinging her ass back and forth between the desks.  But she'd get back at me occasionally. Like the time I gave my oral report on whales.  Two minutes, I had to hold forth about whales in front of the class.  Well I was really trying.  I had worked hard and had my whole two minutes planned.  So I was talking about mammals and amphibians and really trying to get into it and everybody just kept laughing.  They thought no matter what I said, it was hilarious.  I felt all sad and lonely inside and kept talking about blow holes and plankton and they just kept laughing.  Mrs. Haberman thought I was doing it on purpose and she flunked me.  I felt so sad and lost and wished I could just go to Mrs. Haberman's house and walk through her beaded curtains, get all comfy on her floor pillows, cry my eyes out and just tell her who I really was, but I just acted a little annoyed, like I didn't care.

You see, that's the sad part about it all.  I should have read Catcher in the Rye and I should have stopped acting like such an idiot with Mrs. Haberman. I might have saved myself some grief and energy for the next 30 years.  But you never know about these things at the time.  That's the weird thing about life.  You never really know what you're doing until way later when you'd probably do it different. You have to figure out how to make that be kind of funny or you'd go mad.

I never really read anything I was supposed to read--Shakespeare, The Return of the Native, Chaucer, As I Lay Dying...nothing.  I DID read Tess of the D'Urbevilles for some reason when I was a junior in high school.  Something must have grabbed me about her.  I bet she reminded me of Mrs. Haberman. 

I couldn't sit still long enough to read.  I needed to be DOING things, like making boats out of aluminum foil and watching them bob down the little brook behind the house across the street, or pasting construction paper and little cut-out pieces of newspaper to make a special birthday card cards, tying a leash around my little brother Michael's neck, naming him Poochie and leading him all around the yard, practicing sit and stay (He was very good at it), or ironing crayons between two sheets of waxed paper, or making the smiley-faced pizza fun sandwiches exactly like they looked in my COOK BOOK FOR LITTLE COOKS.

I sewed my way through high school - skorts, bathingsuits, blouses with tailored collars and covered buttons.  I spent hours with a Tom Rush record, moving the needle back, back again so I could copy  "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" exactly, note for note on my Harmony Classic guitar,  So, reading was just too slow for me.  But if I'd read Catcher in the Rye or My Antonia or Wuthering Heights,  I might have gotten some good new ideas.  But there we go again with figuring everything out later, and I don't want to make myself crazy.

But, maybe I am crazy.  Now there's a thought.

It's not as though I was totally oblivious.    I understood  a lot of things but I just couldn't get them up to the surface.  And I certainly never SAID anything--especially if it didn't go along with how life was generally supposed to go in my house.  I mean, we were all funny people, so we just walked around the house being funny all the time. We made each other laugh like hell and we figured we were one of the closest-knit families we'd ever met.  Everybody else thought so, so why wouldn't we just go along.  So we all walked around singing fake opera, or re-enacting wallpaper scenes or playing dead in the driveway to surprise anyone who pulled in.  It was all hilarious, really, but with a bit of an edge, as though you have to keep up or you'll drown.  And when sarcasm creeps in, now there's a form of humor that seems friendly on the outside but isn't really at all. My father was the light of our lives, but his jokester side came with a shadow side of temper and sarcasm. Better to clear out when daddy was in a bad mood.  Better to go out to the garage, set up the barrels and practice your roller skating by yourself.  It's kind of the same feeling I got during the whale speech for Mrs. Haberman.

•••

And there’s another memoir in my drawer, an Italian travel memoir, written in 2006,

which involved food, opera, sites and sounds, but I’ll spare you that for now. And besides, I have since discovered the pleasures of prose poetry and flash fiction. These are short forms of story-telling. You must get in and get out. Say it as succinctly as you can. Not always easy. But as Willy Shakespeare reminded us, brevity is, in fact, the soul of wit.

I recently realized the smell of dill sent me to another place, another time.