Anne Marie Pace’s Memory Meme
Instructions – Replace the numbers with your age range. List the categories you want people to use.
Examples: Writing Life, Books, Pets, Jobs, Relationships, Food
So here goes mine:
Give me some random number between 1 and 49 and a category and I’ll tell you something I was doing or something I experienced at that age in regards to that category.
My categories are Writing Life, Pets, Relationships, Food and Jobs. (feel free to ask more than one – this is helping me prime the writing pump.)
19. I’ll give you a choice between Relationships and Food!
At 19 I had been married for just 1 year to my first husband. We rented a little house on Hamilton Avenue in Concord and we both worked at the same car dealership. After work you could usually find us at his parents house for dinner (they both also worked at the same car dealership) or in someone’s garage watching someone put a car back together again. Weekends were spent driving to Fremont for the drag races or going camping or off to airshows.
My world pretty much revolved around doing whatever my husband wanted to do. I had no close friends, girlfriends to do anything with, so I just hung out with him, continuing to follow him wherever he went. And he let me. Sigh.
I’d like Food for 32 please, Alex. Um, I mean Susan.
Food for 32? Hmm. I was living in Oakley CA with my first husband. My son was 11 and my daughter was 7. It was the height of Little League and horse shows and so many activities. The kids were picky eaters. I was a picky eater. Oh, and I couldn’t cook. (Still can’t.)
We ate a lot of Swanson frozen dinners, pizza rolls, frozen french fries and fish sticks, chicken nuggets. I could grill hamburgers and hot dogs and chicken. The kids would eat that.
It was the time of snacks after sports events so there was almost always a cooler of juice boxes and fruit rollups in the car.
The town we lived in was very small (back then, not now) and the only fast food place at that time was the Round Table Pizza parlow which I think we kept in business.
Wow, I wish I could remember stuff like that. I do remember the cooler full of juice boxes, fruit, and granola bars! And then we’d ignore the healthier treats and go get ice cream:>/
Well I am priming myself to remember things. This idea of Anne Marie’s came along at the perfect time, to do this. I had just finished reading a book on writing memoir that I hoped would help me remember things. Then this. I made a spreadsheet with each year of my age, then the years it covered, then started filling things in like what year of school I was in, how old each kid was….etc. Just playing with that is sparking all kinds of memories.
I have very few pictures of the kids when they were kids – my ex HAD them all and now they are gone.
And you’re 49? No way!
Yeppers. I’ll be 50 in a few months. Sigh.
Oh, I have to pick something hard like you did for me! But I have no idea!
How about 27 Relationships?
My pick to you was totally accidental. Your pick IS hard because I am struggling to remember.
At 27 my son was 6 and my daughter was 3. Time to myself was at a premium. And I wanted that time because I was trying to write. My son was in school and gone all day but my daughter, who was NOT an easy child, was still at home. I was a stay-at-home mom but I convinced my husband that she needed to be in day care at least part of the time so I could have time to write. (I’m still not sure how I got him to agree to that as it was a huge chunk of money for us back then.)
He didn’t care about my writing and in retrospect I think it was one of those things that, as long as it didn’t affect him, he really had no opinion.
By that stage in that marriage I understood that I was pretty much on my own with the kids. He didn’t get involved with them unless they did something wrong and he wanted to yell at them. He did coach Little League but for the most part, he went on living his life the same way he had before we had kids.
I was struggling with my identity at that time, wondering how it was that I was married with a couple of kids and no idea what I was going to do with my life.
That must have been a hard time. And you married young.
It was a rough time. And yes, I married right after high school because I was terrified of being alone. My mom had moved away before I finished high school so I had been living in an apartment by myself for the last half of my senior year. (She paid for it but she had moved to Washington by then.)
13 Writing Life
At 13 I was in the 7th grade at Glenbrook Intermediate in Concord CA. You just happened to pick what I connect as the time I really fell head over heels for words, even though I had always written.
My English teacher was Vicki Hackett and she had us do a poetry project where we found poems we liked, copied excerpts of them, and then found pictures in magazines to illustrate them. We were supposed to do at least a dozen.
Always an overachiever, mine was the longest/thickest book in the class. But it wasn’t because I wanted to be the best, but because I found so many poems that I just fell in love with. I didn’t want to leave any of them out.
Mrs. Hackett was so impressed she asked if she could keep the book for the summer and have it bound. I said yes but then she never gave it back to me, which REALLY ticked my mom off. It STILL ticks my mom off if you bring it up.
cool!
Food for 8!
Food for 8. Hmmm….fourth grade at Williams Elementary School in Concord CA. Oh, who was my teacher then? Can’t remember.
My grandfather would have still been alive food was dictated by him. (My mom and I lived with him.) He was a meat and potatoes kind of guy. He was also a hunter and a fisherman. We had food by the calendar. Sunday was always a roast of beef. A few days later we would have whatever was left of the beef in a shepherd’s pie. I was a picky eater and would only eat the meat and the pie crust.
The freezer was always full of duck, pheasants, catfish and venison.
I wouldn’t eat cooked veggies so my grandmother would peel the carrots and put them in a little juice glass next to my plate.
In the summertime I couldn’t wait for my grandfather to come home at lunchtime and share his Spam sandwich with me. 🙂
Lovely memories! Spam sandwiches are like ultimate comfort food for me. White bread, lots of mayo, spam fried a little crisp on the outside . . . or, fried spam with musubi (Japanese rice balls). Hawai’i consumes 40% of the nation’s Spam. During the war, meat was scarce so canned goods were precious.
I don’t think I could eat the wild game your grandfather brought home, though. Especially venison. Who could eat Bambi?
I used to love fried bologna on white bread — must have been the mainlander’s version of your SPAM sandwich. Have you ever fried bologna? It bubbles up in the middle when you cook it — looks just like a UFO.
Oh yes! I had a babysitter, Linda, who would make fried bologna sandwiches!
We did fried SPAM in the sandwich grilled, the same one we used to make grilled cheese sandwiches with Velvetta cheese. (The flip side of the waffle iron.)
It bubbles up in the middle when you cook it — looks just like a UFO.
Remember it well!
🙂
13, pets.
At 13 I had a horse named Sparky. He was NOT the horse of my dreams. (I had been riding a friend’s horse for her while she was pregnant and got thrown bad and my mom figured if I was going to get thrown, it should be on my own horse.)
He was a giant of dope that someone nicknamed Baby Clyde, half quarter horse and half Clydesdale with a Roman nose that only a mother could love.
In the summertime we’d ride bareback down to the corner store for slurpies. That meant riding down a section of road with traffic in both directions. We got hit by a car and I went head-over-heels into the dirt. Sparky was thrown into the barbed wire fence and had 127 stitches. He also wasn’t going to be able to be ridden for 6 months so my mom said we had to sell him. He ended up going to a vaulting camp up in Davis.
Whew! 🙂 thank you for helping me remember.
Food at 15.
I love reading your responses, Susan. Great stories, all of them! You’ve got to be filling in quite a few spaces in your spreadsheet by now.
I used a spreadsheet, too, when I first started brainstorming my memoir. Two of them, in fact. One was a timeline, and the other was brainstormed scenes out of sequence.
What memoir-writing book are you reading, by the way?
Food at 15. Sophomore year, the one year I left Mt. Diablo and went to Ygnacio. All on account of a boy. I can’t remember anything about the cafeteria at Ygnacio but I know that I spent most of my time after school and evenings at the roller rink in Walnut Creek. And all day on the weekends. For dinner we (there were 4 of us that hung out together) would walk up to the Foster’s Old Fashioned Freeze for something to eat. (There were only so many roller rink hot dogs and grilled cheese sandwiches one could eat.)
What I loved to eat there was a cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake. Which is what I would have when I went with just the girls. (Amazing the calories I could burn off skating every day back then.) But when I went with “the boy” I would pretend to lose my appetite and have just a small coke.
It about killed me to watch him eat everything I wanted to eat (except for his strawberry milkshake for which I never acquired the taste) but for some reason I couldn’t eat in front of him. Ever.
Probably a good thing I didn’t end up marrying him. 🙂
Oh, the book is Natalie Goldberg’s OLD FRIEND FROM FAR AWAY.
I didn’t want a bunch of “how to” stuff because I’m not trying to write a memoit, I just wanted to remember things.
Her book is working perfectly for me.
I love Goldberg’s work! Artisq (Laura) sent me that book on CDs, and I’m really enjoying hearing Goldberg’s soothing voice as I work through the exercises.
On the CD does she do the timing for you or do you have to remember to do that?
This prodding via friends has helped. I wish I had 100 questions to answer because I am doing much better at remembering things this way. Oh well – maybe I can do it again once I’ve built my readership back up again.
I’m glad that you are finding the CD helpful for you.
Okay…
Writing at 40 (or feel free to tweak age a year or so to something more memorable, if you wish).
Re: Okay…
Ah 40 was quite a time. A few months before turning 40 I had moved from New Orleans back home to my native California. My soon-to-be husband and I were living in a tiny little 650 square foot place and we shared an office. When we were both in the room our desk chairs could touch, back-to-back.
While living in New Orleans I had sold my first picture book, well, actually I had sold one before but then then company when out of business so it was never published. So it was the first PB that would be in print.
Can I Pray With My Eyes Open? Came out just a about a month before my 40th birthday.
I still had stars in my eyes about the business back then. My agent for that book told me the book would be “evergreen” and in print forever. Alas, last year it went out of print.
I still believed that one book sold to a major house like Hyperion meant that many other doors would suddenly open to me.
I still believed that telling a good story was enough to be a success.
I still believed that….
If I may read between the lines, it sounds like that isn’t a belief anymore.
Tell me about Writing Life at whatever age you were when Hugging The Rock was published, if I may.
(these tales are so informative and interesting — not set of random silly questions on “Getting To Know You” could ever come close to these in matters that matter most).
Re: I still believed that….
I do believe that writing a good story is enough to get you published, usually. I no longer believe it is enough to make you a success.
Of course, remember my post back here on what it means to be a success.
http://susanwrites.livejournal.com/138252.html
I love these sorts of tales too so I’m glad you are enjoying them. You are helping me in ways you perhaps don’t realize. Part of the self-work I am doing right now is to try and break down the wall of so many feelings kept hidden. I need to own my experiences, be here, be now. It can only help my writing.
Re: I still believed that….
PS – I am pondering the Hugging the Rock question and will answer it later today.
Re: I still believed that….
Okay, this is a long one. 🙂
Hugging the Rock came out in the fall of 2006, just a couple of months after I turned 48.
Life checkpoint – I had been married to my soul mate, my best friend and my biggest fan for about 7 years now. The only time I have ever had a partner who believed in both my ability to write and my right to write. My adult son who did not live with me had been diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy a few years before and was having trouble adjusting to the disease. Still does. My adult daughter had a 3 year-old little boy, my grandson, who doesn’t know who I am. Will I ever be called grandma? I doubt it. What does any of that have to do with writing? Nothing and everything.
E and I were living in a rented house, much bigger than the little place we had rented for much longer than we ever should have. I had been ecstatic to have a house with a yard for the dog and the cat….two great trees for the cat to climb. Alas he died a sudden death the week we moved in and never climbed a single tree. I had an office of my own but I didn’t work there. I don’t think I wrote a single poem in that room. It was just a bedroom and I had my bookcases and my file cabinets and a desk for my computer but I couldn’t work in the room. It had bad something in it. Even the dog wouldn’t go into the room. I wrote most of the poems either on the edges of agendas when in meetings at work or on the couch at home. Longhand first.
Tricycle Press bought Hugging the Rock after a long stretch of time. The book had been circulated by my former agent K.and had nice rejections but no sales. I had an adult book, a NF coffee table book, that I had been trying to sell but K was interested in adult books. So I tried to find an adult agent which got me in via the back door to my current agent. More waiting ensued while new agent read the book, asked for revisions, sent it around, etc.
By this time I had been in the business for over 20 years. I had sold hundred of articles, various books (few of which anyone has ever heard of) and short stories. But for the first time, during the process of editing of Hugging the Rock, I felt like a REAL WRITER. I had been writing for years, submitting and selling for years, even speaking about writing for years, but this was the first time I was ever included in the editorial process. Rounds of emails went back and forth discussing line breaks and the art of commas and whether or not we really needed one more poem to show what Mom was really like. It was probably the happiest time of my entire writing life thus far, culminating in the wonderful book launch filled with so many friends, including a great many non-writing friends, and I wondered how anyone could ever want to do anything else with their life but tell the stories they were meant to tell.
No, those aren’t stars in my eyes. Not anymore.
It’s just the way the tears glisten in the sunlight as I wonder if I will ever get the chance to feel that way again.
in a word…
wow!
Sad, happy. Up, down. Forward, back.
A handful of paragraphs written by a writer about the writer.
Thanks for this peek inside!
wow.