For most people I sense that writing is a lost art form. Few people I know take the time to write notecards or letters. I suppose it is the sign of our times. Most people in our culture do not write.
I write everyday. I keep journals. And I will write letters and notecards to people. I feel bad when a week or two goes by and I haven't written to someone.
Recently I took the first real steps towards something I have been thinking about for some time now. The thing is a book. It is a book for my children and grandchildren. I want to present them with the stories of my life. Getting started has not been easy, just like trying to explain here what I am trying to do is not easy. In a sense the stories of my family have been lost as our collective memories fade. What I wish to do is write the stories of my memories and where I can, share the stories of our family. My hope is that another generation will not pass without having some small account of our family written down.
I have made some progress in a few areas but have struggled recently with introducing what I am doing to family who will read this. Hopefully. I have written four to five different drafts and came up with another today. I felt I would share it here.
In mid-July of 2018 I read
John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.
It is a thoughtful telling of an older Steinbeck traveling across the country
to reconnect with America. He had written about American but hadn’t really been
in America for many years. He kept himself to the east and west coasts. It was
a good book to read.
He reflects on the thoughts
of another writer, Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe died in 1939. He was just thirty-nine
years old (the same age as my father when he died). His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel was published in
1929. The book is a part of my library and I directed a production of a play
adapted from the novel in 1984. His book You
Can’t Go Home Again was published posthumously in 1940. Steinbeck agrees
with Wolfe’s thoughts by writing “You can’t go home again because home has
ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”
In wrapping up Travels with Charley Steinbeck says, “In
the beginning of this record I tried to explore the nature of journeys, how
they are things in themselves, each one an individual and not two alike.” I
agree.
I seem to be continually
wishing to be on a journey and what Steinbeck wrote is something I wish to
remember. Just like someone cannot go home again to that place that once was,
one could not recreate a journey that has already been taken. The destination
may be the same but the people and the experience will be different.
It doesn't really introduce the stories, but it might open a curtain behind which the memories lie. It might set one's mind to wondering what did happen back then. If not, then it gave me the opportunity to think on the thoughts of Wolfe and Steinbeck and that is not entirely a bad thing.
