Memoirous

Derby Day was always a big day in my family. My dad would put all the horse's names in a hat and have us kids pull out a name or two and we would root for that horse.. It made us pay attention when the gates opened and gave a backstory to that particular horse. My dad was from Bluegrass country where the number of thoroughbreds are raised. This year’s winner included was a hometown hero. Sort of. The owner and the trainer were from just down the road which isn’t always the case. Also different this year was the fact that the winner was an 80 – 1 longshot. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the race. This is a story of endurance, not giving up, of being at the right place at the right time—as the videos prove. But first, how Rich Strike got into the Derby. On Friday before the deadline for any more additions a horse was scratched which allowed Rich Strike into the race: in the 20th post position, the farthest on the outside. Rich Strike was given an 80 - 1 chance of winning. R...

Over the weekend I read about a new genealogy website, actually a controversy brewing over a genealogy website that spends time analyzing the present—and perhaps, eerily, revealing too much information, about you. In the the article a woman did a people search and her name popped up, not unusual as she was an author, but the troubling part was that at this website the names of her children and their ages was listed. So this wasn’t so much about researching the past, but the present. She didn’t want that info out there. I’ve been off and on conducting research into my family. What I find on the web is both interesting and confusing. For example one bit of misinformation about my dad has snowballed into all the websites that collect and generate genealogical information. It started with a misprint in an on-line newspaper obituary and spread from there. He did not die in 2001, but in December of 2011. Yet, now and forever on the WWW he will have died in 2001. That date will carry ...

Memoirous is about memories. Memory-ish. Last week I taught a class in Winnetka, at OCWW (Off-Campus Writers Workshop. Not sure why campus, because we are definitely not on any campus.) I led a seminar on writing memoir. My abilities are of the –ous and –ish variety. A kind of instructing where I tie in life experience and what I think of as horse sense. Reaching back in our mind for a memory, and from there building. One memory leading to another. Preparing for the class I had a synapse flash of memory. It was triggered from reading the Collected Poems of Ron Padgett, a second-generation poet of the New York School (which was never a school—just as OCWW was never on a campus). There was a line hidden Valley Ranch and immediately I wanted to Google my memory banks. As a kid my family went two or three times to a horse farm in Kentucky—not even to the horse farm country of that state, closer I believe to the wasteland side, where nothing grows except commercial real estat...