My husband Allen has been working on his autobiography “for the family.” And just recently I received links to the online version of memoirs my brothers John and Tim have written in response to weekly email prompts from a company called Storyworth that publishes your collection of reminiscences along with photos you provide in “a beautiful keepsake book.”
Reading these has sent me on a nostalgia trip of my own. Though I don’t envision writing an autobiography, I have written a lot over the course of my life. The other day, I started reading at random in one of the small notebooks I’ve kept on and off for the last 30 years. In one of them, I found a clipping I’d pasted in from a 2001 essay by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post. In it, he observes that “so much of life passes us by, unappreciated…Then gradually time leaches away the remaining vivaciousness, until we are left with only the faintest of outlines and just a few brightly colored moments, the ones that will flutter through our dying minds.” He confesses that he hardly remembers anything about the city where he spent four years in graduate school or the classes he took, then goes on to quote the novelist James Salter: “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”
I don’t have the entire Dirda essay, just the last couple of paragraphs on yellowing newsprint, but I’ve been reflecting on the idea of the written word as what remains of our lives. Much of my experience and interior life are embedded (though often disguised or told slant) in the poems, essays and songs I’ve written. I’m very glad to have these along with the various notebooks, sketchbooks, file folders and yellow pads that have accompanied me through the years. What will happen to them after my death I have no idea, but I feel confident that some of my published work will survive at least for a while. More importantly, my writings help me remember and appreciate some of the “brightly colored moments” of my life.