Grace Notes

An archeologist recently found a shoe that dates back to 5500 B.C.  Reading about it in the NYTimes, I couldn’t help but smile at the journalist who had to wonder who wore this shoe, what kind of life did he or she lead, what was their culture like, why was this item carefully filled with grass and set within a burial cave?  All these questions from a leather shoe with broken and repaired laces.

Archeological references are apt when speaking of memoir.  A flash of memory, an old photo, a conversation around the dinner table, or a Thanksgiving family gathering, and voila! memoir is being articulated.

Some of us, though,  whose natural position is either pen in hand or fingers bent over a keyboard, take those nuggets, those snapshots of memory and imagination, and need to turn them into story.  We need to take the anecdotes, the characters, the situations, the culture and the specifics of history and find a thread of meaning, a connection, an overriding narrative to weave through our lives so we can perceive more of the whole, so we can argue against theories of randomness and anarchy in our own history.

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