Category: memoir
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Memoir: Joking can be serious (1974)
Why do humans laugh? Why do they make jokes? Ask the evolutionary psychologists, and they’ll tell you that people only speak and behave to further the survival of our species. Two scientists at S.U.N.Y Binghamton assert that laughter first began among our ancestors two to four million years ago as a sort of social glue.…
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Memoir: an incomplete healing (1974)
Dorothy Thompson, the “First Lady of American Journalism,” wrote that “peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict–alternatives to…violence.” In other words, at war’s end, enmity between factions is never eliminated, but instead transformed into “peaceful” guises. In my experience, just as conflict persists after an…
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Memoir: my sister Sheila
My sister Sheila had a magical connection with the family Cairn Terrier. Sheila would bang out Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” on the baby grand as Marilyn, the dog, sat on her haunches underneath and howled, much to my delight. It seemed Sheila and Marilyn communicated on an intense separate wavelength, unheard…
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Memoir: down the St. Lawrence and back, part 1–1999
Since the estrangement, I have been staying in apartments close to the Elmhurst house where my three kids live. Kyle is 10, Annie 8, and Faith 6. Summer, 1999: two years since I left the house, two years before our divorce. I’m finally taking the kids and hitting the road: the Canadian railroad. The purposes…
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Memoir: the weaving of a dream 1976
It’s a Friday night in March, and Phil, Glen, Billy and I, all sophisticated 8th graders, quietly climb a ladder into the cramped space under the rafters in Billy’s garage. We bring with us a 12 pack of beer and a transistor radio. The little attic is dark and smells of roof tar and sawdust.…
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Memoir: Clean-up man
My father was raised by a Scottish task-mistress who made him clean the house before he could have fun, and he passed along this mandate to me and my sisters: first you clean, then play. As a boy, I learned to sanitize toilets, scrub tubs, mop floors, wash dishes, and unlike most people, I loved…
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Memoir: moments of freedom, part 1
For this post, “freedom” is the sense of agency one gets when freed from external constraints on one’s choices. This freedom from allows one the freedom to–to choose one’s course in a universe where “free will” is ultimately an illusion. Feeling free never lasts. It’s there for a moment that passes as soon as you…
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Memoir: Where I’m From
I’m from the land of Duality, of black and white, good and evil, sinners and saints. The land of up or down, win or lose, and nothing in between. For years, I saw life in zero-sum terms, and was therefore blinded to a full spectrum of experience. I received my first pair of split-vision lenses…
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Memoir 1973: stepping into adult responsibilities and the counter-culture
In what will be one of the most formative experiences of my young life, the summer after 6th grade, our across-the-alley neighbor Debbie and her family go on vacation to Europe and take my sister Sharon with them. Unexpectedly, they have chosen me to dog sit for their dim but affectionate beagle, Tara. Yes, the…
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Memoir 1971-72: My short-lived love affair with war narratives and killing machines
Playtime in the neighborhood is often coordinated by my sister Sharon’s friend, Debbie Smith. An only child, Debbie reaches out to the younger kids and is a positive role model for us. She organizes alley games of “Kick the Can” that are the most exciting thing in my young world–a game of intense hide-and-seek, not…
The Wikiness 