Category: memoir
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Memoir: What’s in my closet (2023)
English teachers fetishized and rhapsodized the shirts. A surprisingly big part of department culture and practice centered on them.
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Memoir: “All by myself”–reflections on my creativity (1971 & 1989)
It’s tempting for creative people to believe that they perform their creative acts solo, without external assistance or influence. “Gasp! You did that all by yourself? Wow, you’re so creative–so special. You’re different from the rest (in some sense you are really better)!” Getting a dopamine rush from critical feedback like that as a child…
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Memoir: Early memories of dad (1966-67)
Sports were one place dad felt comfortable interacting with me. Otherwise he acted as men who came of age in the 1940s and 50s did: strong, silent, and cool. Except when it came to sports. In the presence of an athletic contest, dad re-animated. Watching a game on our black and white TV, he’d explosively…
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Memoir: Encountering NASCAR (1972)
One day when I was 11, dad asked me, “How would you like to fly to Alabama to see the Talladega 500?” He may as well have asked if I wanted to dance the tarantella on Venus. The question made no sense. I craved dad’s company so much that I readily agreed. Dad ran an…
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Memoir: How the “Greener Cleaners” got started (1986)
In 1974, my friend Karen Frerichs was a 12 year old playing by herself outside her family home in Kankakee. A crop dusting plane coated the adjacent field with pesticide, but it wafted over to Karen on a breeze. Her eye membranes, which absorb pesticides faster than any external body part, took in the toxin,…
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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.…
The Wikiness 