Memoirous

Since May I’ve been playing Solitaire. It started in the rain, in the blueberry fields. I was gifted with unlimited time during an artist residency in a small town in Michigan. I’d wake up and spend myself writing. From 7 a.m. until dinner with small breaks for exercise and meals I’d revise. The work went well. In the evenings I’d sit down to a light supper—either pancakes or lentils. I didn’t have many supplies and without a car, I’d have to bike to Coloma or Benton Harbor for groceries. Except it rained almost everyday for a week. It was just me and my laptop—since the TV hardly worked and I didn’t have Internet access. I decided to check out the games. Hard to believe I hadn’t done it sooner, but I’d never been this bored in my entire life. I finally learned how to play Solitaire. I loved the way the cards fanned out, even the sound effect of shuffling—you know, of stiff cards getting twacked at the corners—excited me, made me feel three-dimensional after a da...

The politics of memory we can choose our past reconstruct it so as to change our future. The way we feel/is the way we remember: ebb and flow, running like the tides, cutting new channels, erasing what once was. Lacking a record, we simply make it up.

Got up at 6 a.m. Sunday (5 central time!) to ride my bike to Antiques on the Bluff in St. Joe to help Jan and Mark set up. They had things pretty well in hand. The event was huge. And the nice thing is the rain held off. Mark and Jan go to quite a few of these shows and know many of the other dealers. It is a guild of sorts. Anyway, Mark told me they know of one woman who gives her pieces a made-up provenance. She’ll tell her customers, Oh I got that piece out of an old barn. While this isn’t exactly true it isn’t exactly a lie. It most likely did come from a barn and since it is an antique it, of course, came from an old barn. It would be false advertising to claim it came out of Napoleon’s barn. The point is: Customers want a story. Yes, they are buying an old pulley, but they know it is more than that; they are buying history. As a writer and memoirist, I know this as well. We can get caught up with how something actually happened and miss the story—or we can lose the exact ...