Month: August 2011

Living in Falls

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Sheboygan Falls is a little town north of Milwaukee, near Lake Michigan, and was built around the falls of the Sheboygan River in the mid-1800s.  The water over the falls was harnessed to provide power when settlement and industry first came to the area around 1835.  I graduated high school in 1991, and Falls had a population of slightly over 5000 people when I lived there.  With a total area of about 4 square miles, it’s a small community, with a quaint little main street that’s a block long, lined with cream city brick buildings, some with bands of stained glass windows across the tops of the stores.

Some of the main street buildings built in the 1850s were a flour and feed store, a tinsmith, and a drug store.  In the 1870s came a wagon shop and a grocery store.  These buildings were painstakingly restored in the latter part of the twentieth century, some complete with tin ceilings and delicate, precise, richly colorful Victorian painting on the exterior facades.  In 1995, Sheboygan Falls’ tiny downtown district was named a “Great American Main Street” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Today, on the main drag, you will find a flower shop, a couple of bars and restaurants, a photography studio, a shoe store, a furniture store and a dime store.  After hours of genealogy research, I found I am related to Rick, of Rick’s House of Flowers.  At least by marriage, anyway.  The shoe store, Depke’s, was owned by my step-dad’s brother and sister-in-law.  They sold mostly squishy tan or white nurse’s shoes – I think they were called Hush Puppies – and whenever I was there I always felt like I had to be extra quiet – like I was in a library, but one where kids weren’t welcome.

The local dime store is called Evans.  It’s a time warp sort of place – when you enter, it seems you’ve stepped back in time a few decades.  They sell a little bit of everything – outdated, but cheap, clothing, old-lady bras – the kind that are pointy and were popular in the 60s, kitchen odds and ends, some games and toys, and toiletries.  I randomly found an online post that describes it well.  “…you can always stop at Evans downtown for a bizarre dime-store experience – I’ve found deodorant on sale there from 1982!”

The Villager is a popular place to go for a weekend brunch or a Friday night fish fry.  Housed in a building that held the original wagon wheel shop, then an ice cream and sweets store, the place has been beautifully restored to reflect its original appearance.  I’ve been told by many people not from Wisconsin they have no idea what a Friday Night Fish Fry is.  Lots of restaurants in Wisconsin serve fried fish on Friday nights.  I imagine the phenomenon started because of the Catholic restriction against eating meat on Fridays.  Wisconsin is full of lakes and local freshwater pan fish are plentiful.  The most traditional fish to eat on Fridays where I grew up is perch.  If you’re ordering perch at any time other than Friday, you refer to it differently – you’re having a fish lunch or a fish supper, but on Friday, it’s a fish fry.

The rest of Falls is entirely residential, unless you count the various churches that are scattered throughout the town.  Streets are wide, and homes are modest.  It’s a quiet, safe, working-class, family-raising kind of place.  At night, it seems deserted.  A local ordinance prevents anyone from parking on the street overnight anywhere in town.  It originates from the need to keep roads free of cars so the snowplows can clear them in winter, but the parking ban extends year round.  When someone has visitors and needs to park on the street overnight, a quick call to the police department gets approval so the car won’t be ticketed.

Quaint and quiet as the town is, as a teenager, I had the most boring existence you could imagine.  There was nothing that counted as entertainment except a bowling alley on the outskirts of town, and you can only go bowling so many times before it gets pretty boring.  It’s a town of bars, churches, and a few restaurants, which is typical of small Wisconsin towns.  Even when we were old enough to drive into Sheboygan, a few miles away and a bigger city at around 50,000, outside the occasional trip to the mall or the movies, we didn’t go there that often.  Most weekends were spent hanging out at some friend’s house, watching Days of Our Lives, taped on a VCR, the latest MTV videos, or on Sundays, the Packer game, and then The Simpsons.

Occasionally my friends and I got a little creative.  One year, we all pulled CB radios out of our garages and basements – I have no idea how we all managed to have access to CB radios – maybe it’s a Midwestern thing – and we made up a game of car tag.  The rules were: While you were driving around town in your car, you had to give clues to your location over your CB radio.  We all had handles, because to talk on a CB radio, you need a handle.  Mine was “Red Baron” because I drove my mom’s red station wagon.  Whoever was “it” started out the game saying, “Hey everyone, what’s your 20?”  Then in turn, everyone else replied with something like, “This is the Red Baron.  I’m on the street made famous by Freddy.”  If you were “it,” your job was to drive around looking for everyone based on their cryptic clues, and when you spotted someone, flash your brights at them.  Then they were “it.”  What made the game tricky is that we never stayed in one place long, so if you weren’t nearby someone when they gave a clue, it might take a long time to find anyone.  We killed hours in the evenings wandering around town looking for each other this way.

Because we lived in such a small town, we were free to roam wherever we wanted to even when we were much younger, as long as we were home for dinner or when the street lights came on.  Through junior high, I spent a lot of time outside the house, hanging out with friends.  We met at River Park, a large park built around the Sheboygan River that ran through the center of town, or played catch with a friend on the huge high school athletic field, or we rode our bikes around town from one friend’s house to another’s.  My sister and I were latchkey kids, getting ourselves off to school in the morning, and hanging out at home alone until my mom got home from work.  In the summer, we were home alone all day long.  There weren’t many rules, except that we couldn’t have anyone over to the house without prior permission, we had to do our chores every day, and if the tornado warning bell went off, we had to get into the basement right away and turn on the old AM radio to listen for weather alerts.  Sitting in the musty, dingy basement was boring after the excitement and adrenalin rush of hearing the alarm wore off.  We used it only for doing laundry and for certain kinds of storage because it got damp and anything not made of plastic got moldy.  We kept a couple beat up chairs down there for the times we were stuck waiting for the all-clear from a possible tornado.

In school, at recess during the winter, we played games that would almost certainly be banned today.  The game I loved most was “King of the Mountain.”  As snow piled up, snowplows pushed all the snow into a huge pile on one end of the playground.  When the bell rang for recess, we made a mad dash to the snow pile, which was probably a good 10 feet high or more.  Whoever scrambled up to the top first started out as King of the Mountain.  Everyone else did their best to knock that kid down, while he or she worked hard to hold the coveted position at the top of the mountain.  There were the occasional injuries – a broken arm or collarbone, and scraped faces from sliding down the icy hill when you were knocked over – but we didn’t mind the risks.  It was just good, plain, Midwestern winter fun.

What I’m reading lately

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I’m reading a very odd combination of books at the moment (see Panel at right).  I have a couple courses coming up at the end of the month – part of my Master’s degree program in Organizational Leadership at Gonzaga University.  One course is called Leadership, Justice, and Forgiveness, and many of the books we are to read are memoirs or non-fiction by people that have suffered greatly, but have learned to forgive, or by people that have been part of the forgiveness process.  I’ve also been trying to catch up on the many books Jeanette Winterson has published in the past ten years.  I loved her early books – The Passion, Written on the Body, and Sexing the Cherry, in particular.  Last, since I’m writing my own memoir, I’m reading many, many memoirs, trying to analyze what makes them hum and what I don’t like.  I recently read Shania Twain’s From This Moment On, and though I found the story itself interesting, I didn’t like the writing very much.  I’d love to hear from readers what your favorite memoirs are, and why they captivated you.  How much of it was the story, and how much of it was the writing itself?

Green Bay Packers

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It’s clear that I’ve benefited greatly from the things my grandparents gave me – love, support, life lessons, and exciting experiences.  One of the passions in my life – and there aren’t that many – is Green Bay Packer football.  You can’t grow up in Wisconsin and avoid football.  It’s bigger than religion and I didn’t know a single family that wasn’t fanatical about the Pack.  My grandpa was no exception, and he passed his football passion on to me.  I spent plenty of Sundays watching the game with him.  He put out cheese and crackers and sliced summer sausage, potato chips and French onion dip, cheese curds and pickles, and we watched the game in the basement, in front of a crackling fire, as we munched on snacks.  He explained the rules to me, patiently describing why someone was called for one of a thousand types of fouls, and we generally expressed our frustration that Green Bay always seemed to lose.  Those afternoons were warm and cozy when the weather outside had started to turn cold.  I was comfortable, happy, and relaxed.

Green Bay is the only NFL team that is still a publicly-owned team, and it’s the pride of Wisconsin, no matter how much they lose.  In the past 15 years, they haven’t done so badly – but when I was growing up, they were a losing team for a long time.  Things turned around when Brett Favre started playing in 1992, and they won a Super Bowl in 1997.  When I was in 6th grade, there was a contest at my school to see who knew the most about the Green Bay Packers.  There were probably twenty questions or so about the team and its history.  I won the contest, which made my grandpa proud.  The prize was a book about the team, which I gave to him to add to his collection.

Grandpa was a football player in his youth.  When he played, they still wore leather helmets and flimsy pads.  He was a tailback in high school, and was good enough to get a partial scholarship to college to play.  He wasn’t able to go because the scholarship didn’t cover all his expenses, and his family didn’t have the money to help him.  He always regretted he didn’t get to play college ball.  He is a devoted fan and loves the Packers almost as much as he loves shooting and hunting.  He has framed autographs from famous players hanging on a wall in his house, and God knows how many books on football and the Packers.

He was at the infamous Ice Bowl between Green Bay and Dallas in 1967.  I have no idea how he sat through that game in the open air at Lambeau Field without getting frostbitten.  The temperature at game time was -13 degrees, and the wind chill brought it to a ridiculous -40 degrees or so.  It was a championship game, though, and my grandfather wasn’t going to miss it.  His brother was with him, and wanted to leave because his feet were completely numb, but my grandpa wasn’t having it.  They stayed, and watched Vince Lombardi and the Packers pull out a win with seconds on the clock.  The victory put them in Super Bowl II and led to their second world title in a row.

Fans that hadn’t somehow gotten season tickets in the early days put their grandchildren on the waiting list, hoping by the time they are adults, a set of tickets might come available.  People that own stock in the team are fiercely prideful of their position as owners, even if they hold no actual influence over what happens with the team.  In 1997, Green Bay issued new stock for the first time in almost 50 years.  The stock can’t be traded, and has no intrinsic value, but many great Packers fans would want to own a piece of the team.  The new stock was going to be issued for a couple hundred dollars a share, and the point was to raise more money for the team.  Since the team is publicly owned, they have no rich owner to fill their coffers.  The public supports the team – stadium and all.

I bought a single share of stock that year for my grandfather as a Christmas gift.  When it came time for him to open his gift, my entire family was completely silent.  You could have heard a pin drop in the room.  Grandpa slowly unwrapped the flat package to find a FedEx envelope inside.  He fumbled with it for a few seconds, clearly confused about what this gift could be.  He slid two pieces of paper out, lifted his head slightly so he could read through the bifocals on the lower part of his eyeglasses, and after he got through the first sentence of the letter, he broke down in tears.  It read, “Congratulations!  You are the proud owner of one share of Green Bay Packers stock.”  The second page was the stock certificate itself.  I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house when we saw his reaction.

Although he owns only a single share, he started going to shareholders meetings in Green Bay, and he loves the fact that he is a tiny bit closer to the team he’s worshipped his entire life.  The stock certificate is framed on his wall with all his other Packer memorabilia.  Even though I live in California now, I never miss a single Packers game.  I have DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket so I can see them play every week, and I often call my grandpa after the game to discuss how it went.  Sometimes, in a big game, I’ll call him 3 or 4 times, excited about how close they are to winning, or frustrated that they made a boneheaded play and turned over the ball.  If the phone rings when the Pack is playing, my grandparents always know it’s me calling.

When I finished my undergrad degree, my partner surprised me with a wonderful gift – 4 tickets to see Green Bay play Minnesota on a Sunday night.  She got 4 tickets because she knew I’d never want to go to a Packers game without Grandpa.  We flew home for the weekend and took my grandpa and my mom’s husband to the game with us.  We made a day of it, visiting the Packers’ Hall of Fame, and spending an hour or so in the massive memorabilia store at Lambeau Field.  Brett Favre had defected to the Vikings and was playing his second year there, what would be the last in his storied career, and we got to watch the Packers beat him that night, on their way to another Super Bowl win.

Quiet days

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Today was one of my quieter days in awhile.  I spent the day reading and did a little blog surfing, as well.  No real writing for me today.  Tomorrow is the pre-season opener for my favorite NFL team, the Green Bay Packers.  In honor of that, and again of my grandfather, of whom I wrote yesterday, I’ll post a short bit I’ve written about football.  Any other football fans out there excited that the season is almost upon us, and is actually happening, after all?

Hunting

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Not long after I started to learn how to shoot, I started to accompany my grandfather on hunting trips.  I couldn’t carry a gun until I was 12 and had completed a hunter’s safety course, but I was allowed to go with him before then.  At first, he took me duck and goose hunting.  We could hunt ducks right on the lake they lived on, and the area around the Horicon Marsh in Central Wisconsin was a prime goose hunting area.  The night before we were going out, I could barely sleep because I was so excited.  That always made it a bit harder to wake up at 3am, but I didn’t really care if I was tired in the morning.  We got up, Grandpa made coffee and hot chocolate and filled our thermoses, and we jumped in the car to head to our destination.  It was always cold in the crisp Wisconsin fall mornings, but my grandpa had lots of warm gear for us, and even when the down jackets and foot warmers weren’t doing the trick, I could still shrug off the discomfort in favor of the magical experience of being out in the wilderness before dawn.

I loved every bit of it.  We set up decoys in the dark, positioning them to look like they were feeding on corn in the field.  I settled in to my tiny canvas tripod seat in a goose blind built along the edge of a cornfield just as dawn broke, keeping my face down so the camouflage bill of my hat covered my skin from the aerial view of the birds.  I sat in silence with my grandfather as we waited for the unmistakable honk of geese flying close enough for him to take a shot.  I listened to him blow on his goose call to draw some birds in when it was slow and we weren’t seeing any geese that were in range.  He filled my thermos cup with steaming hot chocolate to help take the bite out of the cold when it got to be too much.  Inevitably when he put his gun down and rummaged around for a sandwich in his bag or to fill up his coffee cup, a single goose strayed close to us, catching us by surprise.  Sometimes he reacted quickly enough to get in a shot and other times he just managed to spill his coffee trying.  He generally bagged a goose in the morning, and we packed up to go have lunch before we headed home.

As I got a little older, I went with him on deer hunting trips, too.  We rarely hunted in the immediate area, so these were longer trips – a couple days sometimes, depending on how quickly we got our deer.  The whitetail season in Wisconsin runs for one week – the week of Thanksgiving.  It can be bitter cold by that time of the year in Wisconsin, and the experience of deer hunting was entirely different than bird hunting.  We often went with a handful of people – my grandpa’s brother and some guys from his family, and sometimes my mom and step-dad came along.  It was even more important to get out into the woods well before daybreak so everyone could settle in and have a lengthy period of silence before the sun came up.  Deer are generally nocturnal, so they can hear you as you set up in the woods, and they’ll catch your scent if they’re downwind from you.  Things like the wind affected where we each set up, but we always had a well-defined plan that everyone was aware of.  Each of us knew where all the others were so no one ever shot in a direction that would be dangerous.

In most cases, we spread out quite a bit, trying to strategically cover a large area, working as a team, with the goal of each person filling their quota.  Early morning passed in stillness, and these hours spent alone in the frozen woods were some of the most relaxing moments I had while growing up.  As the sun rises, so do the sounds of animals in the forest.  My senses seemed amplified as I noticed tiny sounds and saw all kinds of birds as they moved from tree to tree – woodpeckers, the occasional kingfisher if I was near water, a whooping crane off in the distance across a field.  You rely first on your hearing when you’re trying to spot a deer in the woods – the crack of small branches as it walks quietly through the forest or the scrape of leaves against its body as it pushes through the brush.  When you spot a deer, you have to make a few split second decisions – first, do you have a clear shot?  Are there many branches in the way, or tree trunks that obscure your view?  You can’t move because the deer will notice you, so if these obstacles are in your way, you wait – tense, but silent – hoping it will move so you can get a shot in.  Next, has the deer spotted you?  If it has, you cannot move at all, because even slight movement may spook it.  If it hasn’t, and isn’t looking in your direction, you can slowly move to get in position to take a shot.

I learned early on that it’s never worth it to take a shot you’re not pretty confident you can make.  There is no worse thing to a hunter than to wound an animal and cause it to suffer if it gets away.  In the event you do end up wounding the animal, you have an obligation to track it, find it as quickly as possible, and end its suffering.  Many people who don’t grow up in a culture that values hunting as I did don’t realize how much a hunter values the animal he or she pursues, as well as the environment those animals live in.  I was taught to be utterly grateful for the animals and place a high value on their lives and their deaths.  We field dressed any large animal we bagged when we hunted, and then it was carefully butchered by a professional, and packaged for us to take home and eat.  Smaller animals, like birds, we cleaned and butchered ourselves.  I was also taught that conservation was highly important, and many of the lower middle class families that lived where we did gave money to charities that were dedicated to preserving the habitats these animals lived in.

There was one year of hunting that was particularly memorable.  We went hunting for whitetail deer in the Southwest corner of Wisconsin, and I shot a large doe in the middle of the morning on the first day of our trip, from the spot I had been in since the early morning hours.  Around mid-day, we changed our tactics.  Deer bed down in tall grass to sleep during the day.  We positioned a few guys who hadn’t yet shot a deer in strategic locations at the end of a grassy field that was surrounded by woods.  Then a handful of us spread out in a line at the opposite end of the field and began walking slowly across the field.  This is called “driving.”  Our goal was to spook the sleeping deer so they’d get up and run away from us in the direction of the other guys at the end of the field.  This type of movement can be effective, but also dangerous.  Everyone has to know exactly where everyone else is, and the shooters at the end of the field need to make sure they don’t shoot in the direction of those driving the deer towards them.

A few others got deer that day, and we were all together in the woods ready to field dress the animals before we took them into town to register them and have them butchered.  My grandfather was a little concerned about how I’d respond to the act of field dressing my deer.  It’s not an activity that is for the light of heart, or weak of stomach.  The reason you do some initial dressing in the field is that it’s important to remove things like the intestines and bladder because leaving them in place can poison the meat.

It’s not a simple task, but my first opportunity was a success.  I wasn’t afraid of what I had to do – I had learned it was a part of hunting to properly take care of the animal right away.  My grandpa had to help me with a few of the knife cuts because I wasn’t strong enough to open up the chest, but I had no problem diving in and pulling out all the entrails according to his instructions.  I was probably fifteen at the time, and he spoke with pride later about my calm and methodical work, which left me covered to my elbows in blood, while a 30-something guy in our party was off puking in the bushes.  His pride didn’t end there, though.  He still swears to this day that I nabbed the biggest doe he’s seen in his 50 years of hunting experience.  That year for Christmas, he had the hide of the deer tanned and gave it to me as a gift.

That year was also the first time I went with him to Wyoming on his annual big game hunt.  This was the most exciting thing I’d ever been able to do in my life, and I couldn’t wait to go.

I’m thinking of…

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Today’s writing prompt was “I’m thinking of…”  I sat down to write after checking my email this afternoon and here’s what came this time:

I’m thinking of my grandfather.  I just read an email from my mom explaining that his hemoglobin count was too high.  Apparently that means he has too many red blood cells, or more basically, too much blood in his body.  He may have a tumor, but no one knows yet for sure.  It seems some tumors create extra blood in your body.  Bad news – bad health news – has come in torrents this year.  It defies understanding.  My mother had a stroke on New Year’s Eve.  She’s 56.  My uncle was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer a couple months later.  He’s also 56.  I was diagnosed with severe anxiety in between.  My nephew’s father died in a car crash in April, on my nephew’s birthday.  My niece had to have a piece of her heart frozen with some sort of cryo technology that brings the temperature of the tissue to -72 degrees F.  That was to kill some of her heart because it had two electrical spots that prompted it to beat.  When the second spot kicked in, her heart went into overdrive, beating as high as 300 beats per minute.  Now my grandfather has an unknown “something that doesn’t look right” near his stomach, according to a doctor’s interpretation of a CAT scan.  It just never ends.  He has had so many medical challenges to face in his life.  It took doctors a year to determine his body had stopped producing the enzymes it needed to digest food 20 years ago.  He lost more than 80 pounds in a year without changing the way he ate or exercised and it was all a big mystery for a long time.  They performed exploratory surgery on him back then in an attempt to figure out why he was vanishing.  They found his gallbladder needed to be removed, though he never complained of what doctors said should have been excruciating pain.  He is a borderline diabetic that had quadruple bypass surgery 15 years ago.  He has a wheat gluten allergy and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years ago.  He has pushed through all these challenges and seems stoic through it all, but I can somehow sense that he’s scared – scared of dying.  I know he won’t be able to last many more years.  He’s approaching 80, and that’s very old for men in his family.  I don’t feel the emotion of his impending death as I write about this now, but I often do when I think about it.  He’s always been the most important person in my life and I dread the day he leaves us.  Sometimes it feels like it will kill me, too.

I write about my grandfather a lot in my memoir.  I have dedicated probably 4 or 5 chapters to various things he’s taught or shared with me throughout my life.  I will post a few stories about what we’ve shared next in honor of my thinking of him today.

I am looking at…

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Today I began reading Natalie Goldberg’s books, Old Friend from Far Away, and Writing Down the Bones.  The first writing prompt in Old Friend is “I am looking at…”  My hand ached after writing for ten minutes because I rarely write on paper anymore, and I seem to have lost most ability to write legibly over the years, too.  I’m easily distracted on the computer, though, so I’ve decided to give paper a shot.  Here’s what spilled out…

I am looking at a basket of laundry. My basket is wicker, a smaller oval at its base than at its rim.  It’s full to overflowing with the laundry I washed this morning.  Its contents are organized the way I organize everything that comes from any sort of repetitive task I undertake.  First, at the bottom, my jeans and long-sleeved shirts.  They are the biggest items of clothing I wash (unless you count the towels) because I’m the biggest person in the house.  They fill most of the bottom of the basket, and I fill the leftover gap with socks and underwear – socks that are folded together in a ball, and underwear that’s just tossed randomly into a pile.  Small things that can settle into the space and fill it just right so I can place my next layer of clothes on top.  Next come my t-shirts and my partner’s clothes, which fold up so much smaller than mine do.  I arrange these things to fit neatly, as though each stack of clothes is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.  Pants here, long-sleeved shirts there, short-sleeve shirts somewhere else.  The top layers are consistent, too.  My partner’s socks and underwear – they have to be folded, unlike mine which I just toss in my drawer.  I stack these near the top because if I bury them, they’d get messed up and I’d have to refold them when I get to putting things away.  Finally, the kid’s clothes and bathroom towels go on top because these have to be put away in different rooms.  When I mount the stairs, I will first put away the kid’s clothes, then the towels, then head into our bedroom.  This order makes sense because the basket will stay in my bedroom.  I start furthest away and hit all three places in a perfect order.  I only have to open each drawer once because I’ve organized the piles as I folded them – all like things together.  All this for efficiency.  I’m obsessed with efficiency.  It’s something I do because I can’t help myself.  I plan the most efficient path through the house, trying to combine tasks logically as I go.  I refine my steps as I repeat things.

The exercise was more fun than I thought it’d be, though I cut myself off after ten minutes because of my aching fingers.  A simple glance at my laundry basket, and I found myself writing about my semi-OCD tendencies.  The quality of the writing isn’t important to me – I’m just working on getting in the habit of writing about random things since I’m giving my memoir a bit of a break.  The interesting part of it is that I can see including a bit about my OCD self in my memoir – it’s an element I didn’t touch on, and one that I could generate some humor with.  Mission accomplished for the moment…

Written on the Body

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Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body is one of my favorite books.  Winterson has an ability to mold language in a way that excites me and leaves me in awe.  It inspires in me an appreciation for language and writing that is deep beyond my ability to describe.  The word to describe how her words make me feel is ineffable – too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.  I love the irony of that word – ineffable.  Written on the Body opens with an exploration of love.

Why is the measure of love loss? … Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?  ‘I love you’ is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body. … Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.  It is no conservationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game. A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingoes. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is wonderland isn’t it? Love makes the world go round. Love is blind. All you need is love. Nobody ever died of a broken heart. You’ll get over it. It’ll be different when we’re married. Think of the children. Time’s a great healer. Still waiting for Mr Right? Miss Right? and maybe all the little Rights?

It’s the cliches that cause trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than should I call it love? It is so terrifying, love, that all I can do is shove it under a dump bin of pink cuddly toys and send myself a greetings card saying ‘Congratulations on your Engagement’. But I am not engaged I am deeply distracted. I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me. I want the diluted version, the sloppy language, the insignificant gestures. The saggy armchair of cliches. It’s all right, millions of bottoms have sat here before me. The springs are well worn, the fabric smelly and familiar. I don’t have to be frightened, look, my grandma and grandad did it, he in a stiff collar and club tie, she in white muslin straining a little at the life beneath. They did it, my parents did it, now I will do it won’t I, arms outstretched, not to hold you, just to keep my balance, sleepwalking to that armchair. How happy we will be. how happy everyone will be. And they all lived happily ever after.

I enjoy the way Winterson captures the frustration of love, the way we all want to give up when love doesn’t work out or comes with more difficulty than we imagine.  Then the single phrase within the narrator’s attempt to choose the mundane and safe existence that subtly gives away the fact that the mundane is not what the narrator wants at all – “she in white muslin straining a little at the life beneath.”  The two things I love most about Winterson’s writing are her use of language and the multiple layers that are woven together in her storytelling.  She invokes brilliant images with her words, though this passage is not the best example of that – I’ll post something else later that illustrates her imagery better.  She masters paradox and contradiction in much of her writing, which I love because it’s such a good representation of what it’s really like to be human, and even when she writes of completely fantastical things, I can still connect with the humanity in it all.

Me and my battle with words

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I’ve chosen to title this blog “me and my battle with words”.  I chose the word “battle” because I view words as elusive.  At least, I view the task of finding the right words as elusive.  It’s a battle I enjoy, though.  Many brilliant authors have found their own ways to master language, though I imagine they feel as I do when they write – that there’s a battle in there somewhere.  Finding a way to tame words to your own purpose takes effort, thoughtfulness, and practice.  I took an English Lit class 20 years ago, and was introduced to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.  In section V of Quartet No. 1: Burnt Norton, I found a beautiful description of words themselves that I’ve returned to many times over the years.

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

The lines I love most, and the language that has come to represent what I view as my battle with words, is from the above:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

Do you have any favorite descriptions of words that represent how you think about the writing process?

Memoir writing challenges

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Starting the process of writing about my life wasn’t that difficult.  That’s not to say that my first pass was perfect – far from it – but, if I didn’t worry about censoring or editing myself as I went, the words mostly just came.  I find the bigger challenges have to do with the fact that I’m writing a memoir.  First, many of my memories are those of a child, and I’m sure they are not all strictly accurate.  I have probably associated certain events with the wrong places (I moved around a lot as a young kid), and I know my memory is somewhat selective.  There are major chunks of time, and some smaller ones, that have been long buried because they were too painful to remember.  I’ve made a concerted effort to investigate my past as openly and honestly as I can, but it’s hard to dig back so many years and try to relive emotional and challenging times. My perspective is only mine – I occasionally include thoughts and memories from my sister, but those are the result of fairly recent conversations.  Other than that, I’m sure others remember the scenarios I write about differently than I do – I’m not trying to speak for anyone but myself, but I’m also trying to do so without being overly apologetic.

Second, I write about many things that will inherently be painful for others that were involved in my life.  No life is lived without mistakes, and the people around me made many.  I expect to meet difficulty as I put my writing in front of various people and attempt to get their blessing to move forward with my project publicly.  It’s easy for me to discuss my writing with some of the people in it, but almost impossible for me to figure out how to tackle this with others.  I’ve had some very interesting conversations with family members about some of the topics I’ve included in my memoir.  They see certain things differently – and although that’s not necessarily a problem, it has caused me to pause now and then, and question my perspective.  I’ve made a conscious choice to simply write what I remember and what I think about my past regardless of these things, because if my own memoir isn’t honest from my own perspective, then there is no point in writing it.  It has been a wonderful learning experience, though, and has sparked some discussion in my family that I think is very valuable.

There have been other challenges, but these two are at the forefront of my mind, and are struggles I think are common for people writing about the pain of their pasts.  As others come to mind, and as I work through the process of putting my writing in front of relatives or friends that appear in my story, I’ll post updates along the way.