Writing is I

My first few days on Facebook were tedious, getting friends? How do you do that? It was hard and frustrating to me. I was recently retired, 62, and like an infant when it came to trying this, for me, new media platform. My daughter, Jennifer or Jenny, Jen or Poo or Poo Poo or strung together Jenny Poo Poo, was calm. She understood my Facebook friend’s frenzy and told me her friends on Facebook, were a collection of people from when she was little, school friends, work buddies, relatives and church. This was enough to launch me into seeking Facebook friends.

As each new name came to my mind, the memory of that person followed, and like a long game of tag, I was it. I began to jot down those memories, sentence by sentence, to a platform I was familiar with, Word; a name, a few words and a memory. When my list was 200 or so, I began to fill the What’s on your mind? section at the top of my Facebook page with my memories of the most recently added friend(s) including events of the days we spent as boys and girls, adding in notes from my Word writings.

It felt good to walk on Fort Myers Beach in the early morning, allowing my thoughts to swim around in my mind like the dolphins in the surf, and then returning to the apartment filled with purpose (not porpoise). I was able to do that which so many people let slip through their fingers, reconnect and rebuild long lost friendships. I was eager to write, and after a while I blogged my rants and memories every day, always ending with just sayin’, and making sure to credit God for the opportunity and the blessing.

I discovered, as many do, that music triggered images from my youth. I used Youtube like Woolite, to gently and softly free memory particles from the left side of my brain. 50’s touched on elementary school stories, the 60’s high school, sports, girls, and even the 40’s and Big Band music, when remembering my parents and their generation.

I began writing what was on my mind, non-stop. As Lee Heffner, writer, mentor, story teller, friend and reservoir of help to those writing memoirs teaches, that writing is I, well you, she means the person doing the writing which is me. That, along with whoever said to write what you know, is how I continue to write today. Even stories of fiction, contain truths of what I know. I began to recall moments from my childhood, boyhood and early man-hood. After a few months of posting, Jennifer, my daughter, commented on one of them, “I’d swear I never met you before…. there’s so much I never knew”. As I tried to put her comments into perspective, I recollected the fact that she was born in 1970 (May 5th) and I was only 23 at the time. I understood, that most of what I had written, the previous few months, took place before my children were even born. I think my children, David, Kathleen and Michael would agree that Jennifer feels things very deeply, not that they don’t, but rather, more deeply, than they do. Other than her unprecedented ability to ferret out the better writers of the day, I can say that Jen and I relate on similar emotional levels. We, whenever we talk after long periods of time, can cry like babies; always with joy and sadness of longing and love and as she grows older, with emphasis on happier, pre-divorce times.

My posts are for my children and their families, as well as an open love letter to everyone crossing my path, past, present and future; so too, will be my book; a narrative that began taking shape in my mind, back in 2012. I thought that I should create a written record, mostly autobiographical, as a way of passing on history, as I recall it, and maybe give folks a ride on the “way-back machine”. That written record resides on a separate Word sheet, with over 40 thousand words, which a couple of times a week, I noodle around with, rearranging and setting into chronological order, and I continuously add to, since the flow of memories refuse to stop exiting my 74 years old heart.