Go Deep or Go Home

One writes out of only one thing - one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. ~ James Baldwin

Because I read a lot of memoirs, I can vouch for the truth of this statement. In the hands of a skillful writer like Baldwin, the personal experience the author conveys has to be squeezed dry for every ounce of meaning, otherwise it’s nothing but litany of events, good or bad. The memoirist or personal essayist simply must mine those experiences for the way they’ve impacted his life and his being, otherwise they are meaningless to the reader.

Does it matter if your father favored you over all your siblings, bought you everything you wanted while the others went without, praised your every accomplishment while criticizing them mercilessly? It only matters if that experience changed you or molded you into the person you are today. And how about your siblings? To what extent did your father’s favoritism change them or your relationship to them?

Describing all the ways your father treated you better than the rest of the children in the family doesn’t matter if you can’t give the reader a reason to care. And they will only care if they can relate your experience - and what you’ve learned from it - to their own life. To do that, you have  reflect  honestly and thoughtfully on these experiences. You have to go deep into your emotional memory, not just your incidental memory.

Memoir writing has gotten something of  a bad rap recently. Most likely that’s because memoirs often focus on negative circumstances in the writers life. Abuse, addiction, lost love, physical or mental impairments  - these undoubtedly have a profound effect on a human life, and thus become the subject of many books. New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that “The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one."

I’m a fan of memoir, and I believe in it’s power, but I agree with Kakutani on this point: It’s worthless to expose your life experiences on the page without first examining them in your heart to determine how they might be meaningful to others. Of course that’s the hardest part, isn’t it? Examining all those experiences in the light of day, doing the soul searching it takes to make sense of them?

But nobody said this writing thing would be easy.

Go deep.

Or go home.

Adding Insult to Injury

In addition to all the paperwork to do for  the new house, now I’m embroiled in another cluster#*$% of paperwork associated with our rental property in Florida. Apparently the county re-drew land maps, and in this new rendering it appears that our entire gated community is located in a flood plain. Mind you, it really isn’t located in a flood plain, it just looks that way on the map. (Thanks bunches cartographers.)

Ergo, our nefarious mortgage lender (Bank of America) has decided we need to purchase extra flood insurance. Unless, of course, we can prove satisfactorily that the home is not going to be inundated with water the next time there’s a tropical storm in Southern Florida.

I bet you already know the rest of this story.

More paperwork.

First I have to obtain an Elevation Certificate (FEMA form 81-31). Then I have to include that certificate along with my application to FEMA for a LOMA (letter that states my house is not in danger of being flooded). Of course, along with the LOMA application and the Elevation Certificate I also must send along the following:

Copy of the effective FIRM panel on which the structure and/or property location has been accurately plotted; OR a Copy of the Subdivision Plat Map with recordation date and stamp of the Recorders Office; OR a Copy of the Property Deed with recordation date and stamp of the Recorders Office, accompanied by a tax assessor’s map or other certified map showing the surveyed location of the property relative to the local streets and watercourses. The map should include at least one street intersection that is shown on the FIRM panel.

I didn’t expect you to read all that drivel. Besides, if you’re anything like me you started laughing  crying hysterically after the first sentence. (FIRM panel? what’s that? sounds like something you’d find in my mother’s old Playtex girdle.)

Is it any wonder that people go postal?

I’ve about come to the conclusion that modern life is much too complicated for the likes of poor simpletons like me. I’m tempted to throw my hands in the air and say the hell with it, I’ll pay the extra $300 a year for flood insurance.

But no.

Sometimes I think that’s the whole point of these kinds of campaigns. The huge corporations and financial institutions (and yes, THE GOVERNMENT) figure if they make it hard enough we’ll just pay the extra money out of sheer frustration. It’s like when gas prices suddenly skyrocket. When it’s been $4.89/gallon, we’re actually happy to see it “down” to $4.00 (never mind that it was $3.50 two months ago. Thereby, they incrementally raise the prices ever higher, and we’re duped into thinking it isn't so bad.

I may be down in the paperwork wars, but I’m not out.

Watch out, FEMA. Here I come.

Cash Deposit

<scrunch> <scrabble> <toss> <flip> Oh!

Hello!

Excuse my long absence from these pages, but I have been literally buried in mounds of paperwork and have just now managed to tunnel out for a bit of a breather.

The most recent events on The Road to Brookwood Court have us embroiled in the process of Applying for A Mortgage.

Portentious and important stuff, yes?

I had no idea.

Now it isn’t as if we’ve never had a mortgage before. In the last 10 years, we actually had two - one on each of the home we have in Florida. And while I certainly remember there being paperwork involved, it paled in comparison to the reams and reams of papers needed to apply for a mortgage today.

And it isn’t only tax statements and bank statements - those you would expect. It’s proofs of insurance and copies of deposit slips and copies of all the checks you’ve cashed in the last two months and copies of the credit card accounts you’ve paid off and letters from the bank and letters from the tenant in the rental house and and and and....

Every day it’s another email with requests for more information.

And why? It’s not because we’re asking for an overly large sum of money. Nor is it because our credit rating is bad.

It’s because THE GOVERNMENT requires it. THE GOVERNMENT needs to see every check I’ve deposited in the bank in the past two months, even the 10.00 rebate check from the oil change at the Ford Dealer.

But it’s the cash deposit that almost did us in. A while ago I deposited some cash into my checking account. You remember cash don’t you? It’s the green paper that you can use to buy thing with? Comes in different denominations and usually has the face of a President on it?

Well, I happened to have some cash and- not realizing the danger -  deposited it into my checking account.

“Oh well this is just a real problem,” my nervous mortgage consultant told me. “We might have to produce an affidavit explaining where this cash came from, otherwise THE GOVERNMENT thinks you’re laundering money."

Holy Freaking Cow.

After I spent about 10 minutes railing against THE GOVERNMENT and how they needed to stay out of my f#&*(%^ business, my husband looked at me over the top of the reading glasses he was using to read the fine print on even more papers.

“Careful,” he said. “You’re beginning to sound like a Republican."

Sigh. Now that’s a real reason to fear the cash deposit.

Never mind, we will not let these ridiculous rules and regulations deter us from our final goal. We will continue to collect all the minutiae required in all the acceptable formats.

However, if I don’t surface until after the closing, you’ll know I’ve been consumed by the monster that is THE GOVERNMENT.

But I won’t go down without a fight.

Free Writing

Most of the time we take this writing gig for granted. We can pick up a pencil, sit down at our computers, and write whatever our little hearts desire.

Maybe it’s poetry that inspires thoughtful reflection. Or fiction that takes readers deep into a story and away from their own worries and cares for a while. Perhaps it’s prose that incites action or changes thinking.

Words are powerful tools, and yet we give them away so freely, especially now when we can toss words onto the internet and send them speeding around the world in a manner of seconds.

Of course it hasn’t always been that way, not even here in America where we celebrate free speech and a free press, both hard won by the men who framed our most famous piece of writing, The Declaration of Independence.  Imagine the hours of thought and feather pen scratching that went into that document before it was presented to the world.

Now, 236 years later, we enjoy the fruit of their labor - the ability to write and read freely, without fear of  legal recrimination. What a mighty opportunity that is, to share the written word with others.

Celebrate your freedom to write this Wednesday.

Use  your words thoughtfully, carefully, and then proudly set them free.

Keeping the Faith

Last year one of my dear friends decided to fulfill a long time dream and start a community theater group. Because of her  history in the community as a high school music teacher, drama director, and church choir director, she has contacts galore with people of all ages. A perfect opportunity presented itself - the ability to host the group in her church (St Paul’s Presbyterian Church) - and thus, Paul’s Players was born. Despite her many friends and connections in the community, it hasn’t been easy. This is not an affluent area, nor is it one that really champions the arts. But she has persevered, getting enough donations of time and money to mount three shows in the past year as well as a successful musical theater camp for middle school students. All this while continuing to work as the music and choral director of the church, as well as serve on the Board of her local AAUW chapter, be an active participant in her grandchildren’s lives and activities, and travel on several nice trips this year.

Not a bad resume for a 70 year old retired teacher, is it?

Her plan this summer was to produce a multi-age production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It’s a fun show, she’s done it several times in her career, and was excited at the prospect of getting a group of 40 or 50 young people between the ages of 8-21 involved in musical theater.  She had a group of eager adults ready and willing to help out and we were all excited about working together.

As it happened, staffing was the easiest part. Turnout for auditions was really light. In fact, it was frightening. Despite massive publicity - including personal visits to all the middle school and high school classrooms in within three neighboring cities - as recently as this past weekend we barely had enough people to make up the cast or children’s choir, with the show just about four weeks away.

Most importantly, we didn’t have a Joseph.

But while many of us behind the scenes were getting ready to write the whole thing off, my friend never did. She kept coming up with people she could call, remembering students from past shows and putting out  direct invitations. She spread a net far and wide, casting it out among young people who had found their way onto her stages during the past several years.

Lo and behold, the phone call she had been waiting for came in yesterday afternoon.

“I have a Joseph!” she crowed on my voice mail. “In fact, I have TWO!” And she proceeded to tell me about two young men who had responded to her message within minutes of each other. Both of them recent high school graduates, both of them still finding their way in a difficult world, not quite sure which road to travel.

“The best part is,” she said eagerly, “I know doing this show is going to help them."

Her ability to remain positive - to keep the faith - is astounding, and it’s one of the things I admire about her. It’s a lesson I’ve taken with me from the years of working with her in the classroom and  on projects like Paul’s Players. Whenever I’m tempted to throw in the towel, to say “that will never work!” I remember times like this when it seemed as if we were doomed.

And then we got a Joseph.