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...

We’re in the middle of a heat wave. What can be worse than a heat wave? A dome of heat and humidity hovering over a concrete city. That’s why at this time of year we all dream about going away. We all have fantasies based upon experiences we had as kids of what a true summer is: *Lolling about on a hammock *All day reading on the cot set up on the screened-in porch *A glass of lemonade, condensation sweating down the sides in rivulets *Running through a sprinkler—an act so sublime that it has been lost forever I’m afraid to the Water Park *In a canoe out in the middle of a lake, the cool breezes wafting over you *how about a peach, a bucket of blueberries, shucking corn, cranking ice cream *doing nothing, nothing at all In 1941 E. B. White (he of Charlotte’s Web fame) wrote a small personal essay about returning with his young son to a camp on a lake up in Maine that he had visited during the summer months as a child. The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There...