I’m slowly putting my memoir in chronological order (from age eleven) and deciding which scenes to leave out and which to put back in (that I had already taken out). The story has to be told differently in the order it happened in, as opposed to a present day telling that dips back and forth. Stories connected in a more thematic way before, but now the reader has to be able to follow threads where they may stray farther afield for a while.
There was a scene I’d first written several years ago where my mother tried to persuade me to go to medical school. It has connections to two major threads, so I was thinking of putting it back in. I couldn’t find it anywhere and now wonder how much of my story I’ve inadvertently deleted or lost. But I did find some old writing exercises that were kind of fun.
Here is one from a class with Faith Adiele:
In trying to work on the muscle memory assignment I became very frustrated by all the memories which are not available to me. I wanted to smell the dirt in Kalamazoo. When we dug on the playground at McKinley school, which was next door to the celery fields, we pulled out spoonfuls of rich black muck. Muck holds a lot of water in it, maybe because of the clay base to the soil.
When we planted petunias in the dirt behind the filling station, Grandpa told me that the muck was like Dutch soil and that we knew how to work with it, that it was in our blood. When we moved to Portage, which is a suburb of Kalamazoo, the soil was brown. Mom said it was sandy soil from all the lakes in Portage, but I’m not sure it wasn’t just plain brown dirt and that she thought it was sandy in comparison with what she grew up with on Burdick Street. As a kid, I spent a lot of time digging in the dirt, building forts and hiding treasures. I’d like to put my hands into these soils now, squishing the muck between my fingers and spilling the Portage soil from my cupped hand. I’d like to smell them and see what I can remember.
Instead, I’ve got the Arizona dirt now. On dry days, it’s tough, light-colored and packed too tightly. When it rains just a bit, like it did today, and I step outside, it smells like wet sand in the air. Looking down I see that the dirt has packed even tighter, its matte finish more dense. It takes me farther from home and my memories.
So I wasn’t able to do my muscle memory exercise, but if I could find a Be-Mo potato chip, I might be able to do it. Or maybe those little wax pop bottles.
Reading this is like reading my own writing in some ways, but in others, it is like reading something by someone else. After all, I have changed in recent years–and so has my writing and my thoughts about my past. I wasn’t sure what a muscle memory assignment was meant to do, so I had to search for Faith’s assignment. I found it here:
Muscle Memory: Begin to collect sensory souvenirs that you can incorporate into your standard investigations. Avoid the visual, as we tend to over-rely on sight; instead, eat a childhood candy, listen to what was popular on the radio the month your brother left home, lay your cheek against the hammock you brought back from Guatemala. The sense of smell is particularly evocative; spend several minutes with your eyes closed experiencing a jar of your grandmother’s favorite spice or a bottle of your father’s cologne. Now freewrite whatever memories come to mind.
So the idea was to use sense memories as triggers for writing. I desperately wanted to remember what Kalamazoo muck smells like and was unable to do so. If I recall, I asked someone–probably my father–to mail me some soil.
It’s funny that I was asking for a Be-Mo potato chip or those wax pop bottles of my childhood. I can remember very well what the chips smelled and tasted like and how it felt when the tiny amount of “pop” slid into my mouth from the wax bottle, then the taste and texture of chewing up the wax.
Using your muscle memory, what can you remember?
CAT OF THE WEEK
This is Maverick. I posted earlier about his brother Moe. They need to be adopted together.
Just as I finished this post, I was notified that the shelter is having a lowered fee week for cats and dogs that have been at the shelter longer than 6 months. That includes Moe and Maverick!
