Betsy Carpenter and I had our regular lunch today at Turning Point in Moorestown, after a hiatus of three months, thanks to sciatica and assorted other illnesses on my part. My dear friend Betsy is very healthy, an outdoors person who hikes, inhales nature and is adventurous beyond belief to a couch potato like me.
We've known one another since we lived in the same Berlin, NJ neighborhood some fifty years ago and we enjoy spending time catching up on our family news and enjoying our selections from the unusual, always tasty menu.
Then we began our customary habit of touching on whatever we've been thinking about since the last lunch. Betsy is a philosophical gal... we're both Leos and share a common birthday, so there's nothing we don't discuss. This time, it was about how, looking back on our 82 years, we've discovered how much our youth taught us, how many lessons we absorbed from our many mistakes and how much richer our lives are for having lived and learned.
She recently found a book she'd purchased back in the 90s by William Zinsser called How To Write A Memoir. His advice is sound... rather than write a travelogue through the years, telling the story of our lives from Day One, a good memoir could be a collection of vignettes... pieces of our lives that stand out, that are vivid in our memories, that are part of what makes us who we are today.
Betsy is considering doing this. She has a rich family history with bits of ancestral lore to back it up. She could write volumes of vignettes about the things she has and the memories that go with them.
Not so me. My family didn't settle in the land early like hers did. My possessions date only back to my maternal grandmother and they don't have much meaning except to me, since I and my children and grandkids are basically all that's left of my family.
But as I drove home in a light drizzle that demanded the intermittent services of my windshield wipers, it occurred to me that I've been writing those memoirs all along... my blog entries and before them, the weekly columns I penned for The Journal, the newspaper I nurtured and loved for 21 years of my life.
Some of them have made it onto my computer, but I have a manila envelope filled with yellowed copies lovingly cut from the paper each week by my dear, late friend Marie Martin. Marie believed the columns should be preserved for posterity, not that my posterity gives much of a damn. But Marie did, so I have a stack of them waiting to be copied into folders on my computer.
That's how I'll write my memoir... one column at a time, one yellowed, brittle piece at a time. When I'm finished, I may decide to find other vignettes from my life to add to the collection, but by that time, my memoir will be almost complete. It'll only wait for another blog entry, then another, then another.
