I’ve been thinking about writing In Memoriam blogs about the special people that have been a part of my life. I’d like to spend a week’s worth of mornings writing about how a particular person was an important influence and whose memory continues to be a source of inspiration in one way or another. That’s the ideal.
It’s an ambitious goal and presents a series of special problems.
I wouldn’t want to leave anybody out. I’m already consumed with guilt when it comes to the death of pretty much anybody I’ve known - I didn’t cry enough; I couldn’t make it to the funeral; I didn’t treasure the time I had with the person enough, etc. – so I can only imagine how I’d feel if I left out a grandparent or something. Everybody deserves equal recognition in some way for the impact they’ve had on my life. But of course, that’s not entirely true - it’s just not possible.
I feel guilty already.
What if I don’t have enough to say about the person and I can only write a short paragraph about them but the next person I dedicate an entire page to? A real concern.
Much of the blog would probably consist of stories I remember or that were relayed to me because I was too young. My Grandmother used to scribble down notes and quotes and short stories as they happened on scraps of paper and kept them in her purse so she wouldn’t forget and could easily recall funny or special moments. Invariably, I’d try to consolidate my own purse-full of loose-leaf stories here and miss or forget whole fistfuls of memories.
The benefit of keeping my family’s oral tradition on scraps of paper is that there was never a question of who said what and when.
Quick story. Since it’s really about me, I don’t feel guilty:
I’m 6 years old. My family’s housekeeper and my first friend in the world, Paul Trusty, a man with a gut as big as my 6 year-old body and a faded Korean War Sailor Jerry tattoo on his left arm says about his younger boxing days: “When I was a boxer, I used to fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” I respond, “Yeah, but now you eat like a horse and sleep like a bear.”
As a 6 year old, my status as child genius was cemented immediately. At least as far as my grandmother was concerned.
If anybody knows where my grandmother’s scraps are, they’ll corroborate the story. Because she wrote it down immediately after it happened. Also, I think I totally fucked that up. I sort of think I said something about snoring, not eating. Or maybe it was a pig, not a horse. Fuck. Now I don’t feel guilty. Just old and disappointed.
It’s an unfortunate truth that it’s not possible to give everyone the time and space they deserve in a blog. I can barely sit still long enough to get a blog about nothing down. Anyway, writing is, at best, a shadow. The writer in me wants to believe that when something is physically on the page it, in some small way, is validated. Is made true or real. Ultimately, that only rings true for the best novels and novelists. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is real. Even fictionally, that shit happened. Or is happening. Poor Dantes. (Incidentally, I can’t comprehend how Dumas took a giant dump with “The Three Musketeers” and then just one year later wrote the best revenge story EVER. I confess, I haven’t read any other of his works.)
Anyway, I could never do justice to a person’s memory well enough that it happens. Maybe that’s why I don’t enjoy reading non-fiction. I’ll choose to believe that for the time being, my memories of loved ones can never be equaled by the skill, or lack thereof, of my writing. It would all end up a feeble attempt to apply a chronology to an inherently timeless, amorphous beast.
A large part of why I enjoy copywriting so much is that I am constantly trying to superimpose words where a feeling exists. For example, I’m trying to advertise about a scotch being the perfect Father’s Day gift by examining the “unspoken bond that exists between a man and his father.” That’s hard to write about. It’s fucking unspoken. I look at the challenge like a rock or a boulder I need to crack. I need to do is find a seam, get a little bit of liquid in there, and if the ad works, the reader’s perception freezes it and the rock breaks. The seam, it turns out, is called “insight.”
The water is a combination of my strategy and words.
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