The Stories of Our Lives
“I thank my God every time I remember you.”
That synchronicity deal again. Two independent, unrelated things happened near the same time that enhance one another.
In this case, our son Bailey and daughter-in-law Kelly gave both Dianne and me Storyworth subscriptions for Christmas. Since the beginning of 2023, each of us gets and will get this year a weekly question to write about memories of certain events and people in our lives.
We upload them, add pictures if we wish, to Storyworth who will collate, bind them into a book at year’s end. I guess our memoirs will be a sort of ‘autobiography’. My Aunt Martha Morgan did hers last year and it is terrific.
Not long afterwards, I heard an interview with noted psychologist Mary Pipher. The author of the bestseller REVIEWING OPHEILIA: SAVING THE SELVES OF ADOLESCENT GIRLS has recently published A LIFE IN LIGHT: MEDITATIONS ON IMPERMANENCE.
She has 58 short, well-written chapters that could be a sort of Storyworth response to questions about the happenings, mix of joys and struggles of her life. Pipher writes so well it is both encouraging and discouraging to me.
As the book title and many chapter titles (Heart Light, Daughter Light, Musical Light, etc.) suggest, light is the main image, metaphor for her. Especially, the way light and dark mix in nature and in human experience.
She uses my longtime favorite word -‘dappled’ - to express this. Picture the dappled mix of light and shadow of the sun shining through the leafy branches of a tree to form a lace pattern on the ground.
“Dappled light shows us what is here now will soon be gone in an instant. Nothing stays the same.” Speaking of aging with her brothers and spouses, “Knowledge of our finitude (has) helped us love one another even more.”
Even more, Pipher explores the light and dark, joy and struggle, entwined in most of our experiences and relationships. She tells of her father and mother’s difficult but caring relationship, about her troubled but in its own way loving family. I’ve quipped along the way that most of us are products of loving dysfunctional families.
Besides being the same age as me, and like me finding ‘dappled’ light as life and experience instructive, Pipher like me is also a book person. She grew up in remote midwestern small towns. The library was a place to expand one's life and light.
“Over time, the library became my church and reading became my way of understanding the world. I built myself from books…. Many people only experience one life, their own. But if you are a reader, you can experience thousands of lives from all times and places.”
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So far with Storyworth, there are mostly ‘first’ questions.
Your earliest memory…First vacation…First job…First public event that caught your attention…What was your mother like?... What was your father like?...Tell about when you first met mom/dad. Even first dog… (stay tuned for that!)
In time I expect there will not only be questions about the entrances but also exits along the way. And oh! the jumble of them.
Dianne and I are following our own separate tracks with our responses. Though our lives are Kudzu connected, they are two lives! I have noticed what a good writer she is. Concise, clear, to the point: she writes her response to each week’s question and sends it on.
Of the ten or so questions so far, I have only ‘completed’ three or four of them. For the others, I keep going back rewriting, revising my meandering prose. (Some of you may have noted a preponderance to meandering in my preaching.) I console myself with one of my high school English teacher’s counsel that good papers are not written but rewritten.
For example: I told of being at the beach the first time when I was four. After initial experiences of the water turning me topsy turvy, the briny burn in my nose and eyes, my mother began teaching me to float. She gently coaxed me to trust the scary water to hold me up.
Over the years, I realize how much love she was showing, how hard her mental health struggles were for her at times. This experience became for me a sort of physical parable of faith, maybe an expression of her faith.
Bubbling up from memory for the first time, I recall how my mother and I drifted too far out on an innertube one afternoon. I now recognize how hard and scary it was for my dad to swim out in the choppy waves to bring us back safely to the beach.
A small crowd had gathered and tended to us when we got back, especially my gasping out of breath dad. I now see and appreciate how many times my dad kept us afloat in iffy financial times over the years.
Some incomplete reflections on memory travel for the stories of our lives…
FORWARD: Remembering is not so much going back to something that happened as it is bringing it forward. Not a matter of living in the past but letting the memories enrich our now’s, seeing how much more was going on than we saw then. Often that makes the imperfect love given and received more precious, evidence of amazing grace.
Frederick Buechner often pointed out that there is a bit of scoundrel in saints, and a bit of saint in scoundrels.
UNFINISHED: It can be terrible. It can be wonderful. But what has happened is not finished with us, and we are not finished with it. The actual facticity of something may be fixed: the dog bit me; my friend moved away; my mother was in the hospital for a long time; I sat next to Johnny in the first grade…
But if we are still breathing a la the famous Faulkner line: “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” At long last, no guarantees, but we may turn out better, kinder because of what was initially only perceived as bad.
UNFOLDING: Our memories have a dynamic, unfolding even life changing effect on us. I have spoken of the sacrament of the red splotch before. It's that red mark on my forehead (usually standing in for my heart) when I palm whap myself for only now seeing the love given to me or the jerk I was being at the time.
I find that paying attention to the Storyworth prompted memory, I recalled something I had not remembered or recognized before. As we get older we see more of what was going on in those experiences, or things we just missed.
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A while back, a physician friend was visiting me in my then church office. He pointed to the books on the shelves. 'My patients are like these books. Each one is like a book I want to understand so I can give them good care.'
Folks, blessings for the book of each of your lives. Keep writing and revising those dappled chapters about the story of you.