Memoirous

After losing both of my parents in a matter of 2 months, I'm now more than ever reflecting upon the transience of life and what remains when everything is done. The Tree of Life. The Tree of Life is a film by Terrence Malick whose earlier work has exhibited an ethereal quality--grass blowing in the wind, long takes of actors staring across empty fields, etc.  I'm not sure how to describe this movie. Is it a montage, a series of vignettes, moody, emotive? But more important than what it says are the questions the film forces us to ask: What is this about? Where's the story? --spoiler--it has no traditional storytelling arc. Tree of Life is flash memoir. Moments. Ordinary. Riven. Island. A mother's voice. A father's criticism. The look from a younger brother. Trust. Betrayal. It is about the threads of life that weave in and out of all of us. I couldn't stop thinking that the house in the film reminded me of my Aunt Jane's house in Upper Sandusky, Ohio...

These unremarkable moments, they come and go, then disappear into an abyss of moments, similar in their familiarity. Staring into pure nothingness. Yet, I am made up of these moments of the ordinary. The laundry, the rising and lying down, the steady rhythm. A day like any other day, one right after another. When sometimes all that gives it shape is a cup of good coffee, the #78 arriving soon after I cross the street, or a robo call from the library letting me know a book I requested is now in. If all we aspire to when writing memoir is the monumental or heroic, the turning point or plot twist, then we are likely to overlook the mundane, which is actually the flesh and bone of existence. Sitting around a table at Shotzy’s Bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio after Mom’s graveside service we shared simple remembrances. Mom never had to write a resume or beef up an application. There were no bullets, no highlighting her accomplishments. Her life revolved around husband and home, and as noble ...

All this going back and forth to Ohio—I’m ready to be done, to go back to a normal routine. I need to eat a salad to make up for all the eating. A run would put some miles between the long drive there and back. Regular stuff like washing my hair and a long bath would help to transition. Back & forth. There & back. What is normal and what is routine about a life now changed, cleaved into separate parts? Before & after. I want to go back to before. Before Dad died surrounded by family and before Mom died alone in the hospital. Stop time. Make up for lost time. Rewind. Here & now. I’m left with this side, the rest of what is to come. Forever & ever.

Every family has one—the odd relative. My husband had a great uncle who because of seizures never worked. One day walking home from school my husband, a little boy, saw the man laid out on the lawn. He kept walking and never mentioned it to anyone, afraid his great uncle might possibly be dead. Back then society had a way of accommodating an idiosyncratic or oddball. They were often referred to politely as sick, though the illness they suffered had nothing to do with a three-day flu. Or their behavior was shrugged off as just “their way.” But the 40s and 50s was also the era that brought us One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest . In my book Orphan Girl I wrote about Marie James who narrated a hellish existence as a patient before escaping from an asylum in Wisconsin. I know the field of mental health has made progress since then. In the 1970s the pendulum swung the other direction. The doors to institutions were flung open and during the bleak Reagan years the majority of homeless on the...

  In college my mother and then later both my mom and dad worked at Wild Waves motel along the shores of Lake Erie at Mitiwanga, Ohio. Motel is perhaps a euphemism. By the time my parents started taking me and my brothers and sister up to the lake, the place was getting ragged around the edges. The newer duplex cottages were all right, except the beds sank in the middle and the lamps had the dimmest bulbs ever. Worst yet were the original cabins made out of logs. Yup, little log cabins which might sound quaint if they weren’t infested with wood spiders. The one-room cabin was roughly the size of a double bed—so very little walking space. You slept pretty damn close to those spidery walls. Wild Waves had definitely seen better days. Situated between Vermilion and Huron along Route 6, Wild Waves at one time sported a dining room where guests could get their lunch or dinner, tennis courts, and a fine sand beach. There was also shuffleboard and a pingpong table constructed ...

Rita Ann Myers 1924 - 2012 Rest in Peace Gone on this St. Valentine's Day to be with her beloved Harold

In the Great Divorce C.S. Lewis conjectures that what we sense is reality might actually be a dim mirror of a realer reality. That’s right. If we think this is all we have: the here and now—think again. Behind this world is another where the sky is bluer, the grass greener. I know this comes across as sentimental “over the rainbow” and there is no way to prove there is a parallel universe. There is no bridge that connects us. My husband likes to tell me that my version of how something came off is simply my narrative, my overview. His postmodern opinion is that there is no objective one truth. Versions of what we think happened are as varied as the number of people who contribute their side of things. I believe my mother has crossed over. She’s fully engaged somewhere else other than here. Where she is mixing up biscuits, making cole slaw, cleaning out cupboards, searching for her rain cap. Harold is with her—and at the same time so also is her mother. Her sister Gwen doesn’t have...

We don't have cable so when we watch Mad Men it is on disc--immersed in a whole season at once. We just finished Season 4, so I'm still in the 1960s: the avocado-green wall phone and the plaid jumper Sally wore. I think I was Bobby's age when the President was assassinated. Don and Betty Draper would be in their late 80s today. As I was cleaning out my parent's house last month I made all kinds of discoveries. Like most kids (I'm referring to myself here) I never once thought of my parents as people. They were Mom and Dad. What they did before me really never entered my mind. Their life consisted of station wagons, split two-level houses in subdivisions named Spanish Trace, North Village, or Highmill Estates. They were first of all parents, then perhaps golfers or members of the country club, or the ad men on Madison Ave. The notion that they had sex, addictions, or a secret past was the stuff of TV dramas and not particularly anything to do with our family. ...

I'm dealing with my mother who is downward spiraling into dementia/Alzheimer's. For Mom it is all about memories. She remembers working at the lake during the summer while in college. Ask her and she can tell you the name of the lady who used to live down the street--and her dog's name. Mom can recall her chili recipe by heart--just not swallow the food. We're back to the basics, again. After a medical crisis, she now needs to relearn how to sit up, swallow, and eat. We have to cue her to hold a spoon. Oddly enough all these actions that used to come automatically are stored in our memory locker and when we lose the combo we've no longer access to the contents. So as someone who teaches memoir, don't take for granted the small things, This is especially important for when crafting flash memoir. For Proust it was cookies. Today try to recall a simple pleasure. Is it enjoying a cigarette on the fire escape, hot dog Saturdays, a walk to the lake, or opening...