Memoirous

As a writer I’m always getting edited. Sometimes as a person I feel like people are trying to edit me. Life can be challenging—much like writing a short story. Last week I received an e-mail via this blog about an essay I wrote over two years ago about Lake Erie called Wild Waves Motel. Tim wanted to catch me up on some of the facts my piece left out or entirely screwed up. My memory was definitely terrible. Mainly he and I connected over the emotional touchpoints. What I loved most about his taking issue with my memoir flash was his take or perspective. As a kid when I got up early to wander down to the water—can you imagine today’s helicopter parents letting their kid wander down to the beach alone?!—I’d occasionally notice one or two dead fish washed up. He also remembered the dead fish, for his own reasons. Lake Erie back then was a little better than a cesspool. It would be a few more years of concentrated effort and a decided shift away from manufacturing and indust...

What I Saw on my Walk Last Night I stepped outside and saw someone in front of the halfway house jiggy dancing and down the street a league of African nations play soccer on an empty lot, with overturned trashcans and PCV tubing for makeshift goals. After passing them, even from a block away I can still hear them cheer and roar, Score! I walk past Margate Field House where a man wearing a bra on the outside of his shirt sits with his shopping cart. He also sports a fabulous hat, we nod at each other. Next I meet a father walking with his son on a bicycle. He rides a bit crooked, tipping back and forth between the training wheels. Then there is a family of women, a grandma, mom and a smattering of children. Grandma wears a white linen veil and a sari of white. If I were to guess I’d day they were from Eritrea. St. Thomas of Canterbury Catholic Church hosts Eritrean Coptic services. The old woman stops and speaks to me, what looks to be a burnt match clutched between...

I subscribe to a number of blogs, one of which is Setting Prisoners Free by Jeremy Nicholls where he writes and photojournals about the homeless in Chicago. Check it out! I will frequently re-post or share snippets from his blog. Jeremy is a case manager with Cornerstone Community Outreach ( CCO ) here in Uptown, Chicago. CCO recently has had a number of successful housing victories. The social work field is very statistic oriented. Numbers play a large part in who gets money—and outcomes—that's the lingo for what we sometimes refer to as miracles. Men and women who have been chronically without an address, living on the streets, homeless. Jeremy has tried to breakdown what’s behind this phenomena of housing some of the hardest of the hard-to-place. Though there are a number of factors he has cited one thing in particular: iPads. This from his post “Making Housing Happen” : I believe 2 tools have helped create many stories of successful movement. Firstly, carry...

Right now I have 3 visitors staying with me from Baghdad. I know, Baghdad. the only place less safe right now might be Gaza. And, safe, it's just a relative term. I asked the girls how their families were faring. Without trying to be coy or evasive, Rand looked at me and said, "Growing up, during nearly two decades of war, if I only heard 3 bombs go off during the day--that was good." The girls were here for a vacation, so on the second day when one of them lost or had her wallet stolen, it was a real downer. She wasted a lot of time running around to the consulate and filing a police report (not sure why since the report contained little information about the incident--not even an official stamp). Anyway, the mishap reminded me of when my daughter was traveling and had her cell phone stolen. Kids--we're so worried for them when they travel. There are a multitude of things that can go wrong--and something usually does. And, because they are our kids, even a thousa...

I can’t stop watching this video. I woke up this morning thinking about it. And I’ve tried to parse my emotions or rationalize them. Would I like this video, this song even if I didn’t know the story behind them? Would the images alone have stayed with me? Probably not. But what are images without story, and what is story without some kind of picture in your head to go with it? Isn’t this the power, the driving nexus of being human—what art is all about, really. The images are uncannily raw—real people, real college . . . one that sounded familiar when I first started watching. Hadn’t I heard something recently about Seattle Pacific University? Oh, the hi-jinks, the stupidity of being 21, 22 years old. The utter recklessness. The surface emotions, the underlying passion, the fire in the belly. Then— It’s what happened next that could be described as a videographer’s good luck or someone else’s nightmare. But, filmmaker James Marcus Haney keeps the camera rolling whe...

At times we can feel blocked. I know July is an especially hard time for me when it comes to posting blogs. Before I know it another week has gone by and I won’t have posted. According to my stats I only average about 8 posts in July. So when I get to Friday often I’m left wondering—where to start? As I mentioned earlier I just read a VERY GOOD biography by Deborah Solomon about Norman Rockwell. Here was a guy who had deadlines. While he was at the POST he made a total of 356 covers. That’s 356 paintings—many the size that goes over the mantel or above the couch. (In case one thought they were the actual size of a magazine.) Here was a bit of advice I gleaned from the book. Two nights a week Rockwell would go into a spare room devoid of distractions and stay there from eight to eleven, when, more often than not, he’d leave discouraged—not having gotten any new ideas—remember he worked on a frantic deadline, a new painting every 2 weeks “The second night, after a few minu...

I’m a in a summertime non-fiction stage. Losing myself into pages upon pages. That’s the nice thing about non-fiction—you can read as fast as you want and not have to worry about the thread of a story or the outcome of certain characters. We already know what happened to them, we only care about how they got there. Right now I’m immersed in the life of artist/illustrator Norman Rockwell. American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon is a highly readable and enjoyable biography that doesn’t seem to gloss or get lost in the controversy of whether Rockwell was a true artist or the definitions that separate an artist from an illustrator. The high attendance that accompanies exhibitions of his work have taken care of that. He is popular, so was Jackson Pollack. He was the stuff of headlines, so was Mapplethorpe. Warhol bought several of Rockwell’s paintings. Perhaps he shared an affinity with Rockwell as Warhol started off his career as a commercial ar...

Where Foster Beach becomes Omaha Beach, where the shock and awe of Baghdad rocks Lakeshore Drive, where everyone in the city not only owns a gun but an arsenal of fireworks. Where the sky lights up and the buildings reverberate the chest-thumping KABOOM, where all night long m80s punctuate the city soundscape, and the pop-pop-pop of Blackcats compete with infrequent gunfire. Where Roman candles sizzle and burst setting off car alarms and where children chase falling sparks as if they’re fireflies. Where screamin’ meemies spin and whistle while overhead pinwheels of color blossom and dissolve into a shower of stars, once alive but now extinguished, leaving behind contrails of vapor. We shake the numbness from our ears. Where even the moon smolders behind a haze of red, green, and yellow and sulfur clouds hang suspended, making the apparitions below seem as if they are moving in slow motion. Where each concussive blast answers with yet another explosion, louder than the last. Where ...

I grew up solidly middleclass. My family had a membership to the Four Seasons Pool Club in Washington Township in Ohio. From Memorial Day until Labor Day we could walk right in and show our card. There were summers of lessons, of pool birthday parties, of hanging out with friends. The pool also had non-swimming activities like a night where they showed old movies. I still remember how big the June bugs looked amplified as they passed between the lens of the projector and the screen, and how the dust motes caught in that bright shaft of light danced and twinkled like little stars. I’m embarrassed to admit it though, but my favorite thing was the snack bar. The different names of the novelty ice creams conjured up whole stories inside my head. There were the Rocket Pops in red, white, and blue and the orange push-ups, glorified sherbet but with a creamy goodness, also called Dreamsicles. There was the Drum Stick and I think something called a Fred Flintstone bar. The ice cream sandw...