I BECAME MYSELF
Wednesday Oct. 24, 2018
Memories, or memoire ~ words I understand but I’ll ever capture just the right combo but writing is about writing with writer finding satisfaction in the story and in its telling. Reader is eavesdropper of sorts ..
Each time I wander down this thought-lane I recall mentor Frank Dabbs asking me about ‘this book within me’, to answer this: “Which section of the book store would shelve my book? What genre?”
My answer then, and still, “Anywhere but that remainder table”.
Our lives, as if previewing exhuming our own remains, can tell our story of how we got here and how we became who we are – or they can just be the bones and dust that return to earth as ashes and dust. I don’t want to be buried or incinerated – neither has much appeal. Maybe better to be lost, never to be found. But nobody would know. More interesting, is whether anyone would care …
How ‘I became myself’.
Hard to know if that is subtitle for memoir, epitaph or simply a short question begging a complex enlightening answer. Details help. Truth helps. Objectively is only feigned …
Can you answer for you, how you became yourself?
I don’t have a clever raison d'être dissertation. I could stab at it but doubt I could pin it down in two decades of trying …
But after 15.5 years of doing this column writing every morning, you might wonder if it is time I circle around an answer. I wonder too.
I probably wonder most on Sunday mornings – there seems more time between papers and coffee and bathroom trips to sit in one room staring at a ceiling or in another gazing outside at the weather. And the sunshine. At moments I feel like a poorly programmed hard-drive in search of meaning but only finding memories, searching for that ‘key phrase’ never finding misplaced documents but finding so many others ‘I hadn’t thought about in a long while’.
