writing

I've been trying to write for a couple of weeks now. I write most mornings in my journal about the things in life that seem to pop up and command my attention. The effort to sit down and start to write something like a play or a piece of poetry or fiction seems to escape me for the moment. This afternoon I sat down and read through about a dozen legends and stories from the Paducah area to try to fashion them into a Ghost Tour as a fundraiser for the theatre. As I read the many accounts I couldn't help think about all of the people who have lived and died in the very buildings that I work in and walk by everyday. People who spent their whole lives getting up in the morning and going to work or raising a family and being part of the community. Some were famous around the world because they cured diseases and others wrote books or performed on Broadway or in film. However most of the people who are the subject of ghost stories are everyday people. They ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some locked themselves away from the rest of the community and became recluses. The kind of people that kids would run up and knock on the door and then run away because they were dared by someone else.

I walk the bookstores (Hi, my name is Michael and I'm a bookaholic.) Thousands and thousands of books line the walls that people have spent years writing and most will be put on the discount table within a year. I walked through a video store the other day and saw row upon row of movies that were all discounted. I'm reminded of the story of Jim Henson and the production team that made the movie the Dark Crystal. After spending almost four years of their life on the film they went to the premiere and afterwards they all sighed and then someone said "Well what shall we do for dinner?" Producing a play is kind of like that. You spend weeks and weeks working on something and then it opens and life is at its peak and then it closes and the next show goes into rehearsal.

I talked with my mother today and she told me that my father is talking less and less. His illness is slowly turning him inward. The question that came to mind, was about who a person is. If you don't remember your family and your friends, you don't know the people around you and you live in a world that seems strange and frightening who are you? My wife told me about a book she just read that a woman who was losing her memory had a list of questions that she had to answer each day, who her children were? Who she was married to? Etc... The day she didn't know the answer to the questions she was instructed to open an envelope and to follow the instructions written on the paper. The instructions told her take all of the pills in a certain bottle. She had made her own suicide plan. However she couldn't remember to follow the instructions after she put the paper down. This person was still capable of feeling and being loved by others but was incapable of knowing who she was. With people with memory lose, who will remember their stories years from now?

I worked on a will this weekend with one of these computer programs that you buy. It talks about leaving assets and estate planning. I have a trunk full of my journals that I have written over my life time. There are lots of things in those journals that I would like my daughter to know- The first time I fell in love. The first time I held my daughter in my arms. The things that scared me most as I went out into the world. The things that I dreamed about doing with my life. Yes, even the mistakes I made along the way that I would like for her to avoid. There are several things that she probably shouldn't know about her father. Who I am has been collected in the pages of those journals. I can't help but wish that my father had written his life down. Not to publish as a book for the world to read, but as a book for me to read. To know who he is when he can't tell me himself. For some of these stories that I've been reading today, the only reason that I know anything about these people is because someone remembered it by writing it down.

A friend of mine once joked that all good stories start out with -There once was a man who had two sons... My father had two sons. I was the oldest and left home as soon as I turned 18. Yesterday was my younger brothers birthday. He still lives in my hometown and works for the same company that my father retired from after 40 years of service. My parents were going over to his house to celebrate with his family. As usual I am hundreds of miles away. My father probably won't remember the occasion, and even though I wasn't there to celebrate with my brothers family and my parents, writing it down has helped me to remember it for him.

In sense maybe I am writing a book with my journals, a book that is important to me. If someday I happen to suffer from the same disease as my father, well maybe I'll have an interesting story to read about a father who had two sons, one of which moved away and had a daughter...