Yesterday I was hit square on the jaw with a memory so vivid I could have woken up bruised and not felt surprised. It was the kind of memory that lasts seconds in the life of a teenager, but pops up unexpectedly twenty years later and all you want to do is run head-on into it to feel and smell and taste that one clear thing.
My immediate response to the recollection was, “I could write this.” Then I preceded to compose sentences and list publications and punch the gas along a country highway between here and there.
Today I sat down (a gift to Linda; here I find in practice I am absolutely wrong about my Ups and Downs) to write out the memory, find the story and create something beautiful out of hormones and punk rock, and I realized that most of all I wanted to give the memory back to the person who helped create it.
Maybe the story is a story, but maybe too, it’s five lousy sentences on a Facebook page waving to an old friend.
Sometimes it’s a story, a poem, a song, an essay, a fable, etc. They are all ways of paying back memory and handing it down to others. That’s why memory is the mother of the muses.
What a mother she is. It would be good fun to use one story idea to write in these various forms as an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. Thanks, Ray.
Ha! Sometimes we don’t know how we write until we write.
Thanks for the link.
Isn’t memory an intriguing thing? Sometimes it’s fertile soil birthing a gorgeous rose, and other times it’s a swamp floating up a rotting corpse, but either way it’s the source of inspiration for our stories.
Linda, you’re priceless.