Memoirs and memories

Recent conversations with potential clients for personal memoirs have made me think a lot about who tells stories and what kinds of stories they tell.

Of course, this isn’t really anything new for me. Since first becoming interested several years ago in helping people to write their memoirs, I’ve devoted plenty of thought to questions about personal story-telling. But as we consider more and more potential projects, the questions become increasingly interesting.

For example, because much of our potential clientele comes from the senior demographic, where memory loss is sometimes an issue,we’ve been asked how we can write about someone’s life when his or her memory seems so spotty. That’s an easy one for us to answer: we can bring in family members and close personal friends of the subject to help jog his or her memory, retelling stories that the memoir subject has told many times in the past. 

Sometimes these stories help the memoir subject to remember related stories. Sometimes one family member will remember one anecdote and another family member will remember a related one, and soon we have a whole stream of stories flowing.

But just as often, family members who think their elderly relative will have trouble with a memoir project because of perceived memory loss is pleasantly surprised to find out that the subject can remember stories from the past just fine. This makes sense, actually: memory loss in seniors often relates more to short-term memory than long-term. As the typical joke goes, people who can’t remember where they left their car keys can still remember the name of their second grade teacher from 80 years ago. But this works to the advantage of us memoir writers. We don’t need to know where your car keys are; we need you to remember what matters to you from the past.

Questions also arise about what people may not choose to tell. Our answer is that we help people write memoirs, not autobiographies. They are free to include or leave out whatever they wish. Accuracy is certainly helpful, but comprehensiveness isn’t necessary. We encourage memoir subjects to tell the stories they choose to pass on and leave out the ones they would rather not have figure into an overall reflection on their lives.

What becomes more apparent to us every day is that not only does everyone have a story to tell – after all, that’s the basis of our memoir-writing business – but everyone also has someone who wants to hear their story. It may be a large and diverse audience; it may be just one person. It may be several decades of students or devotees of someone’s professional persona; it may be one spouse or one child. But we have yet to find anyone who can’t find a single ready ear eager to hear the story they can pass on, or a single ready pair of eyes to read the text, increasingly engrossed in the story of a person they thought they knew but about whom they may still have so much more to learn.

When things change

Phone calls are not the typical means of communication among my friends and me these days -- we're much more likely to email, Facebook-message or even text -- so it was unusual that on Thursday, I had not one but two fairly lengthy phone conversations with friends.

And coincidentally, both conversations were about changes they were facing. Friend A had just accepted a new job; Friend B was contemplating a house purchase.

The conversations were significantly different, the only common thread really the theme of change. Friend A was thrilled with what she was facing. After several years working part-time in marketing and office management for a very small business, she was about to start a full-time position with a larger company in a different line of work. I expected her to balk at the longer hours -- 9 to 5 instead of 9 to 2 -- but that part didn't seem to bother her at all. She was excited about new people, new challenges, and a new workday schedule. Her teenage kids were up for the challenge of adjusting to doing more for themselves after school, and her husband was encouraging about the extra money she'd be making.

Though I have no wish to make a job change myself, I could certainly relate to her excitement. I was more surprised by Friend B, who after many months of house-hunting had found the house that seemed to meet every one of her family's search criteria and yet couldn't convince herself that making an offer was the right thing to do.

"But it's just the house you wanted," I said, a little bit puzzled. "You won't find a better match. The alternative is to stay where you are. Why wouldn't you take this opportunity to make a change?"

Well, I suppose the answer should be obvious: because some people don't like change. Some people don't like it at all. Friend B is fond of her house and perfectly happy to stay there, because it's beloved and familiar, never mind that she'd been looking for a house just like the one she found for months and so was wavering about whether to take the leap.

I should be sympathetic to this. I used to be a lot more resistant to change myself than I am now. Or not so much resistant to change as just drawn almost magnetically to routine. I liked things to fit into their own established pattern. I liked having household routines, holiday traditions, annual plans with friends, events on the community calendar that I could return to year after year.

And to some extent I still do, but habit and routine no longer seem like the hands-on winner over change and innovation that they once did. A few changes happened that I could not prevent, and I discovered that there was something refreshing and renewing about having to adapt to new situations, even ones I hadn't sought out.

So now I feel differently about change. I appreciate it as a chance to hit the restart button, in a way. Of course, this is a particularly easy time of year to talk about embracing change. With week after week of frigid temperatures and snowstorms, it's easy to look toward the bright side of change. Underlying it is the hope that the season and the weather will soon change: warmer temperatures, longer days. In the middle of October, with school successfully underway and the days full of blue sky, sunshine and golden foliage, I'm perhaps less likely to sing the praises of change for change's sake.

But other times it seems like a not unwelcome sign of aging. Yes, in my 20s and 30s I loved the idea of tradition and routine, but I eventually learned that things change whether you want them to or not; might as well appreciate it rather than shrinking from it.

So indeed, this is a time of change, for both the friends who called me on Thursday and maybe for me as well. Each in our own way, we will learn to adapt, whether eagerly or resignedly. Nothing stays the same long, regardless of how much we might wish it would. Might as well reach out with optimism to whatever new thing life offers up next.

More snow to come

Clear and cold for the next couple of days, and then, according to the forecasters, more snow.

I feel sheepish in admitting that my heart leaps a little bit with those words.

What is it about snow lately that sparks a pulse of excitement? Why am I finding myself a state more typical of childhood than middle age, in which the prospect of being snowed in once again thrills me?

I’m not sure. All I know is that after several somewhat curmudgeonly years in which a snowstorm, while pretty, connoted all kinds of inconveniences, it seems I’ve reverted to childhood in my delight at the mere words “snow day.”

When I try to trace the evolution of my relationship to snow through the past few years, it begins to make a little bit of sense. As a young professional in my twenties, I lived in the city and walked to work. Snow meant a cold, messy trudge through slush and over snowbanks to get wherever I needed to be, and against a backdrop of gray buildings and parked cars rather than meadows and forests, snow just didn’t seem so pretty or romantic.

Then I discovered another perspective on snow, as a homeowner in the suburbs. In our first home, snow meant shoveling and snowblowing our driveway, and stress over how to get to the office. This was before the days of telecommunications, and a forecast of snow meant a restless night of worrying about the drive to work – or an anxious day in the office thinking about the homeward commute.

Once we moved out to the country, it wasn’t a matter of shoveling or snowblowing anymore. We lived next door to my parents’ farm, and they had all the snow-clearing equipment anyone would need to keep a driveway usable.

But that wasn’t so ideal either. My father took care of plowing on the farm, our driveway as well as theirs, and hearing him out in the middle of the night plowing made me feel anxious and guilty, even though I knew he wasn’t doing it specifically for my sake. Still, I couldn’t much enjoy a heavy snowfall, knowing it meant he was setting his alarm at regular intervals throughout the pre-dawn hours to get out for another round of plowing.

And from there came my kids’ early childhood days, when a snowday brought them glee but me still further worries. Which parent would be the one to miss work and stay home if the kids didn’t have school? By this time Internet connections and other telecommuting capabilities were a natural part of our lives, but little kids and a work-from-home day aren’t a productive mix. It made me happy to see the kids having fun in the snow, but there was still an element of uneasiness as the unmet deadlines piled up.

But somehow in the past few years, that changed. We moved to a different house, where we pay for a professional plow driver whose truck headlights cutting through the pre-dawn darkness don’t make me feel guilty at all. Of course, in the back of my mind is the awareness that across town my father is still getting up before down to clear their driveway, but at least I don’t feel complicit anymore. And the kids, now in middle school and high school, certainly aren’t any trouble on a snow day: their preference is to sleep until ten, read, maybe play a few rounds of ping-pong.

So I suppose my reborn affinity for snow comes from the fact that we’ve come full circle. My life is now at the point where I can feel like a kid again when I hear that there’s snow in the forecast. With my own kids, I can revel in the unexpected chance to sleep late, and then be home all day and not have to dress for work or drive anywhere. While they read or play ping-pong, I can still get work done and not worry about missing deadlines.

Somehow the coziness is back, the feeling of being unexpectedly but joyfully circumscribed by the house for the day, the extra time created by cancellations. It wasn’t something I expected to find again; I had come to assume in adulthood that only kids could really relish snow days.

But I was wrong. And if I have yet another chance this winter – this very week – to remember that, all the better.

Never quite enough sleep

As I so often do, I’m once again renewing my efforts to get more sleep.

This is nothing new. It’s a perennial resolution. The kind of perennial resolution that fails. I always tell myself I need to get more sleep, and I always try to design ways to get to bed earlier, but it’s a plan that never really materializes.

I shouldn’t say that so passively. It’s not as if anyone but me can effect this change in my habits. This change won’t magically materialize; I have to make it happen.

Late evening is just such a gold mine of productivity. Once everyone else is settled into bed, I finally have time to give my uninterrupted attention to other things. Paperwork, or article deadlines, or all too often the frivolity of Facebook.

A friend asked me recently why I use one of the newly popular sleep-tracking apps, a technology tool that tells me exactly how long I sleep each night and how soundly. “It’s the same thing as weighing yourself every morning,” I told her. “It’s not that I actually do anything different based on the number; it’s just that keeping track of it makes me feel like I could potentially use the information to make positive changes.”

“Six hours,” she said disapprovingly, checking the latest number on my sleep-tracking app. “You need to try harder.”

It does seem like there’s no better time for improving one’s sleep habits than midwinter. Bed is the warmest and coziest place to be once the sun goes down. Our evening commitments are few these days, and walks after dinner are no great temptation when it’s well below freezing out. If ever there’s a time for getting to bed earlier, cold dreary February must be it.

It takes effort, but I have to try again to improve my sleep habits, and I have to remind myself: all of these little tasks, the paperwork and the household details – not to mention the siren song of social media – will still be there when the sun comes up tomorrow. There’s no reason I have to attend to it right now.

Last week I came across this useful pointer in an article about stress relief: “Allow yourself a brief period of time to fully relax before bedtime each day—even if it’s only taking a relaxing bath or spending 30 minutes with a good book. Remember, you need time to recharge. Don’t spend this time planning tomorrow or doing chores you didn’t get around to during the day. You’ll be much better prepared to face another stressful day if you give yourself a brief reward of some free time.”

Yes, and I’ll be much better prepared to go to sleep, too, if I read or relax rather than trying to maximize the productivity potential of every single minute up to bedtime.

So, once again, I’m resolving to improve in this area. I’m redoubling my efforts to get to bed early. Yes, it’s a perennially broken resolution of mine. But that’s no reason not to keep trying.

Oh, the decadence: NPR in the shower

It’s pretty decadent, I admit.

But when my in-laws gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday last fall, I already knew what I wanted to spend it on: a wireless shower speaker, so that I could start my day-long NPR fix just a few minutes earlier.

As it is, I listen to NPR while I’m running, while I’m driving, while I’m cooking and doing housework. If I’m by myself and not reading or writing, I’m usually filling up my brain with a steady stream of news, culture or commentary from NPR.

And the silence in the shower was starting to seem like a waste of time when I could be catching the headlines or the first couple of stories on Morning Edition.

I confess, I’m a little bit sheepish about it. Surely there’s something to be said for reflective silence once in a while, even if one has to impose it upon oneself grudgingly. Surely there must be a price to pay for my choice to remove even the silence of the shower from my day. Will it curtail my creativity, I wondered? Will I never again come up with a random thought, if even when showering I can be listening to someone else’s voice?

Before buying the wireless shower speaker, I read reviews on Amazon. “It used to be that the only thing I could do in the shower was get clean!” proclaimed one highly enthusiastic new user. I wasn’t sure whether this was meant to be facetious or not. It used to be that getting clean was the sole function of a shower, but now it’s a time for absorbing the headlines as well. Is that bad?

Sometimes I do feel remiss in taking so many measures to eliminate reflective silence from my life. I inhale audio content whether I’m exercising or working around the house or, now, even during the lather-rinse-repeat cycle. Along with the silence, am I eliminating any possibilities of unbidden musings or meandering digressions of the imagination?

Yes, probably. And yet I’ve always found that some of my most useful unbidden thoughts come to me not in times of silence but rather accompanied by white noise. Sometimes it’s exactly the distraction of a BBC commentary or an interview with an obscure jazz composer that leads me to think up article ideas or essay topics.

The bottom line is that I love listening to the news in the shower. It just feels like a more interesting way to start the day. Gretchen Rubin, author of “The Happiness Project,” writes that there’s no shame in admitting we like our material possessions. So there it is. It’s the ultimate decadence, NPR streamed into the shower, but it’s a wonderful way to start the day. Learning about international events that occurred overnight; finding out the weather forecast for the day ahead; catching a movie review on the cusp of the weekend.

And I also get clean, which has come to seem almost like a bonus. But it’s a pretty good way to get the day launched.

"One Little Word" for 2014

For the past four years, I’ve taken part in the One Little Word challenge. This is a collaborative event in which participants from all over the country choose one word to use as a guidepost or inspiration in the upcoming year and submit it to a website, which gathers together all the words so that they may inspire other people.

In 2011, I chose “Possible.” For 2012, “Succeed.” And last year, “Walking.”

Some years, I admit, it’s a pretty amorphous exercise. “Possible,” for example, seemed so tentative as to be wishy-washy, and yet it was just how I felt as the year began. A lot of things were possible, none certain. If the word has a rather neutral tone, so did my feelings about the possibilities for the upcoming twelve months. Much that was possible did in fact transpire.

The word for 2013 was stronger in its meaning but perhaps mundane: walking. It reflected my acknowledgment that walking, as in going for walks, was far and away one of my favorite things to do, mundane or not, and that one focus of the upcoming year had to be a priority on finding time to take walks.

This year, the word came to me out of the blue: Radiate. That too may seem like a strange word, compared to the more typical choices – the ones that hundreds of participants to the One Little Word challenge submit to the website – words like Inspire, Simplicity, Joy, Acceptance, Hope. “Radiate” sounds a little bit like “radiation,” which seldom has very auspicious connotations. But “Radiate” is what I feel like as the year begins. I feel like this is a year for radiating kindness, radiating generosity, radiating acceptance. Not holding good things within but sending good things outward, in waves: from within myself out into the world. Happiness. Contentment. Gratitude. Starting within, radiating outward, rippling in circles around me, casting an ever-wider influence.

That may be a lot to hope for in the new year, but at the moment it feels right. I will try not only to be generous and kind and caring but also to have those intended attributes radiate from within and cast light around me. It’s not just a matter of being all of those things; it’s also about sending them out into the world.

Radiate. A verb this year, whereas other years I’ve had a gerund – walking – and an adjective – possible. It would be overreaching to suggest that this is a year for action words. I don’t yet know what this year will call on me to do or to be. But I am trying to radiate well-being and other good things as I make my way into 2014.

Snow and ice and a polar vortex: keeping up the streak

So far, 2014 has been a challenging year for maintaining a running streak.

 A storm on the second day of January brought over a foot of snow, making the footpath on which I normally run unusable since the town’s budget doesn’t cover clearing the footpaths. This left me with the option of running multiple random laps up and down our long common driveway, from one house to the next to the next and out to the road, sort of a starfish shape, each complete tracing of the starfish earning me about three-quarters of a mile. Which meant I needed to trace the course at least twice even to earn the minimum one-mile requirement that keeps a streak runner on the USRSA registry. And since one mile isn’t really much of a workout, if I want any of the other benefits of running aside from remaining qualified as a streak runner, I needed to do a little more than that. Three or four laps along the branches of the common driveway gets very, very tedious in very little time.

But before the snow had any chance of melting, the polar vortex descended. I had never run in sub-zero temperatures before, but I did last week. Not for very long at a time, though. On the handful of days that it was under ten degrees, I put on as many layers as I could wear while still remaining upright and did just a mile. I found that by wearing tights, pants, a t-shirt, a heavy sweatshirt, and then a lined hoodie belonging to my husband, with sleeves that ran a good four inches past my fingertips and a hem that ended almost at my knees, I was plenty warm enough, at least when the wind wasn’t blowing directly into my face. But all the apparel gave me the shape and mobility of the Abominable Snowman. A mile was all I could manage before the sheer weight of all the clothing exhausted me.

Finally at the end of last week, the sun shone and the chill abated a little bit. It was warmer by only a few degrees, but that was enough to start the melting process.

Which, of course, meant ice.

So I put on my YakTrax, which give me decent traction in the snow but, like the layers and layers of warm clothing, also adds a certain ponderousness to the run. Yak Trax aren’t heavy or clumsy, but just cumbersome enough to make the run tiresome.

And then on Friday I tired of the Yak Trax and convinced myself that the layer of powdery new snow would provide enough traction that the ice wouldn’t be a problem. I enjoyed a pleasant run that day. It wasn’t too cold and the powder did feel nice on my unfettered feet. Until the last ten yards or so of the route, when I hit an ice patch that was invisible under the new snow and fell flat on my back.

My first thought was typical of a streak runner: I was within a snowball’s throw of the two-mile finishing point, so I’d definitely cleared my necessary daily mile and the run still counted. My second thought was that nothing hurt too badly.

But it’s hard to fall flat on your back on the ice and not hurt at all. Soon I realized how sore my tailbone was, and I’d wrenched an arm while trying to catch myself as well.

So it was a tough week for running. But on Saturday, the temperature was well into the thirties by the time I was dressing for my run, and the ice was gone from the roadway. I ran a warm, comfortable, safe, easy ten miles, savoring every step all the more for all the weather-related travails of the preceding days.

“Doesn’t a mile on the treadmill still count toward the streak?” a friend asked on one of the coldest days last week.

Well, yes. According to the rules of the United States Running Streak Association, running on a treadmill is just fine. But I consider being outdoors for at least ten minutes part of the challenge along with completing the mile, I told her. I like having a streak of not only running every day but spending at least a small interval of time outside very day. No matter what the weather. In snow. On ice. During a polar vortex.

Still, this week is better. The air is milder; much of the snow has melted. We’re not even halfway through January; more winter weather will probably occur before the season ends. But days like the ones we had last week remind streakers that it’s almost always possible to get that mile in, one way or another. It gave me a chance to become ever more creative at dressing for the cold weather, and it reminded me of the value of Yak Trax.

The streak continues, and my tailbone has mostly recovered from the fall on the ice. I’ll be grateful for milder temperatures this week. Wind chill isn’t a particularly good feeling, and neither is a bruised tailbone. But persistence feels good, and I’m glad to have made it into another week of streak running.