My memory is going. This isn’t new, not really, but combined with the years-long writer’s block I’ve been until now halfheartedly fighting, it terrifies me that some of the things I want to write about, some of the things that might be worthy of sharing, will be gone before I get to them.
As weak remedy, in the past three years my notebooks haven’t been filled with drafts as much as they’ve been filled with web-style1 bones of stories, and of shaky sketches of layouts of houses I spent time in as a kid. I draw each house over and over, trying to get the proportions right, thinking that somehow enhanced accuracy will pull some deeper meaning, more than just a set of rooms.
There is my grandparent’s house in Baltimore, where a combination of estrangement and aging relatives means I’m unlikely to go inside again, unlikely to see the mural of a starter waving the checkered flag at a race car that appears stationary, logos of prominent racing brands in the background. The car was probably supposed to appear in motion and the flag man in some sort of celebratory mood, but instead the car looks stopped, and the man looks angry.
This is the room where I slept when I’d come to visit, by its size likely meant to be the master bedroom, but was the room my mother shared with her grandmother as she was growing up.2 It’s a strange mural for a master bedroom, and in the gender-norm locked world of 1958, when the house was built and the mural painted, even stranger for a room occupied by a young girl and her grandmother. The closest thing I got to an explanation was that the house had been in a model home, but aside from the Pittsburgh toilet in the basement, the house was nice but otherwise unremarkable.
When I sketch out the rest of the house, other memories come back, like the always-on radio in the kitchen fighting for aural supremacy with Lawrence Welk blasting from the TV in the living room, both of those occasionally drowned out by my attempts to teach myself piano on my grandmother’s electric organ. The house was loud, chaotic, though I have good memories there as a small child. By the time I reached adolescence, I saw what my mother had seen for decades, and my uneasiness there grew.
My godparents’3 house was sprawling and surrounded by farmland that someone else took care of. My mother and godmother were close enough that we walked through the open garage and into the kitchen without knocking. The house had more rooms than they could find daily purpose for, and as a result, half the house was pristine—a dining room, a study, a parlor, a fourth bedroom—while the rest of the house was well lived-in, not unclean but with clear signs of life. The sheer size of the house made hide-and-seek extra challenging.
Their son was my best friend essentially from birth until puberty hit, and what time we didn’t spend climbing hay bales or being dragged behind a mini out-of-control tractor we’d stolen4 was spent in the unfinished basement, where we’d play with G.I. Joes and watch the Addams Family and Gilligan’s Island on a portable black-and-white TV. The basement had a mold problem and the air felt damp after it rained, but it was by far my favorite place in the house.
.
With the time we spent outside, my hazy blueprints don’t work as well here. My godparents’ house is a puzzle I draw continually—I am still a little unsure if there were two spare bedrooms or only one, and where the second staircase led to—but a map of the surrounding area is probably more helpful here.
Their house was surrounded by all of the bucolic trappings a kid should have: expansive fields, wooded areas where we’d occasionally get lost, plus a shallow marsh pond where my friend would dig for slugs while I stood back. He was always more adventurous than I was, far less afraid of the consequences of things like jumping off the roof, something he did often but that I could never bring myself to do.
Once, way too young, we decided to run away in the middle of winter, dragging a sled across the fields, tiring of our boots sinking in the snow after what felt like miles but was probably a handful of meters.
I didn’t try to run away again until a decade later, but with a plan abandoned as soon as I remembered that my mother knew everyone in our then-small town, and that she was likely to be alerted before one of the two Greyhounds of the day passed through.
But that was running away from my own house, a three-bedroom ranch house in a subdivision infinitely less exciting than my godparents’ house and less confounding than my grandparents’.
My sketches here are more minutely defined. There are not just rooms, but specific corners and crevices I want to be sure to remember. I had a bedroom, but proximity to the primary living areas made me too easy to find. Remembering the place where I grew up just brings back memories of wanting places to hide, to be by myself, to listen to music or read uninterrupted. I am being careful of what I say here, and it does not serve the narrative.
The closet under the basement staircase was never what I wanted it to be: it had the dramatic air I craved, and I had (and still have) a sense of contentment whenever cramming myself into as small a space as possible, but I hit my head too regularly, and making proper use of the space meant dragging in a utility lamp that unclamped itself often enough that I amassed a few too many burns from the fallen metal shade.
There were other spaces, other closets and alcoves blocked off by boxes, and on dry days the most effective places to hide were actually outside: the front porch ended just before my bedroom window, and an evergreen created a three-sided crawlspace that was rife with worms but excellent for finding silence.
In the period where I was paid to write, I was reasonably reliable about putting together something passable, maybe even good, on deadline. Shifting into editing has made me self-conscious: I second-guess my own understanding of grammar, and continually write and delete sentences from the page, worrying that the narrative is self-indulgent and inefficient.5 “Writers write” is supposed to be an empowering phrase, but one that relies on steady output to feel validating. In my own mind, “writers write” is a polite phrase disguising a much more cynical “but what have you done lately?”
I’m not sure this, this “what I’ve been doing lately,” meets my own criteria of what it means to be a productive writer. But it’s serving to offload some memories to bring others to the front of the queue, and that’s got to count for something.
This is the style of brainstorming I was taught in elementary school, and apparently it was a popular way to start to teach the early phases of composition in the late eighties and early nineties.
My memory is that the grandmother was a spiritualist, or would at least listen to spiritualist radio shows at high volumes while my mother was trying to sleep. If true, this would be an interesting well to draw from, but those estrangements mean too much digging might do more harm than good.
Technically, for most of my childhood they were just “my family’s closest friends,” but they got the promotion when I was nine and requested to be baptized, believing that taking communion would evoke literal epiphany and that I would join the rest of the congregation in belief and faith. It didn’t. There’s more to that. Another time.
This is 100% true, and I am still unsure how we both left the situation unscathed or managed to stop the tractor.
I believe that some of this is a result of being in a field of editing that lives and dies by word count.