Whenever I think of the power of childhood memories, I am reminded of the MFA graduate lecture of author Sarah Sullivan while we were classmates at Vermont College.  Sarah guided us in an exercise that asked us to remember a place where as a child we felt safe, a place where we felt “cradled in security.”  She helped us through a series of guided questions to remember that place and suggested that in some ways we're always longing to go back.  We began by drawing the place, sketching in details as best we could remember.  Once immersed emotionally and visually in our “safe place”, we were asked to gradually ponder these questions: “What do you see?  What do you hear?  What do you smell?  Are there people around you?  Is there an animal nearby?  What is above you? (a ceiling? tree branches? the sky?)  What is below you?  (water? grass? a floor?)  What do you remember?”

“Without our memories, what are we?” asks Leonard Pitts in a recent column.  “We are the equation after the blackboard has been wiped, the sandcastle after the wave—smeared images and shapeless shapes melting into the sand.”  (Chicago Tribune, p. 18, 10/30/14)  He's referring to recent visits with a favorite aunt who's now living through the lens of Alzheimer’s.  Yet she still remembers.  Maybe not what happened ten minutes ago, but what happened fifty years ago.  She remembers how to sing “The Way You Do the Things You Do” with the Temptations and how to hug her nephew, and what it feels like to go to the movies.  Leonard Pitts’ fond remembrances of his aunt echo the emotional resonance of the novel The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean, a story that shows how the mundane present existence of an Alzheimer’s patient can’t hold a candle to her powerfully moving memories of life decades earlier when she helped rescue art treasures during the Nazi invasion of her hometown in Leningrad.  Without our memories, what are we?

Maybe the old adage, write what you know, would be better phrased, write what you remember, write what you feel.  Sarah Sullivan’s memory exercises are powerful methods to get at what matters most in a story, what Sarah calls “the emotional truth, the stirrings of a writer’s heart, the wood smoke rising between the lines.”

While I was at Vermont College, I learned an insightful question, for women in particular, to ask of ourselves:  Who were you before you put yourself last?  For many of us, finding out who we were means looking back to when we were teens, when we first began thinking we understood what set us apart from the world and that we knew how we would live our lives.  We didn’t know, of course, but oh, the confidence of thinking we did.

I am enchanted by the ending of one of my favorite short stories, Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff, when Anders, the main character, remembers how he once was “strangely roused, elated, by” the “pure unexpectedness” and “music” of words.  When we who are writers finally stake our claim upon words, how deeply satisfying it is to remember back when they first charmed us.

I am also mesmerized by a passage from This Boy’s Life – A Memoir  by Tobias Wolff, when he describes being a troubled young man at a tailor’s shop, outfitted in a black cashmere overcoat with a claret silk scarf, looking in a mirror:
     The elegant stranger in the glass regarded me with a doubtful, almost haunted expression.  Now that he had been called into existence, he seemed to be looking for some sign of what lay in store for him.
     He studied me as if I held the answer.
     Luckily for him, he was no judge of men.  If he had seen the fissures in my character he might have known what he was in for.  He might have known that he was headed for all kinds of trouble, and knowing this, he might have lost heart before the game even got started.
     But he saw nothing to alarm him.  He took a step forward, stuck his hands in his pockets, threw back his shoulders and cocked his head.  There was a dash of swagger in his pose, something of the stage cavalier, but his smile was friendly and hopeful.  (p. 275-6)

We do not know what lays in store for us, but there is joy in knowing that a writer’s career never ends – a writer can be published for as long as he or she can compose words.  And it doesn’t matter if what was written the day before was dribble.  Every day is a fresh opportunity, a clean slate to claim who we are.

When I was a child, I loved to climb trees.
Trees gave me a sense of physical exhilaration
as I scaled the trunk and limbs,
a far-reaching view
of my patch of the world,
and the healing grace
of respite and solitude.
Today, when I peer
into the high branches of a tree,
I remember the utter feeling of
powerlessness I experienced as a child
and the certainty each time
I shimmied up a tree
that I would one day emerge
from the dark days into a canopy of light.

Five favorite picture books about trees:
A Tree is Nice by Janice Udry
Leaves by David Ezra Stein
Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina
Christmas Farm by Mary Lyn Ray
Tap the Magic Tree by Christie Matheson

                     A TREE GROWS IN MY HEART

Many years ago, my husband and I toured a house we hoped to buy in our local historic district.  Our first concern was not the amount of restoration the house required but the massive tree out front, a towering maple with limbs resembling a sumo wrestler.  The tree had grown so close to the end of the driveway, I was certain I’d hit it whenever I pulled out with our car.

“You’ll never hit that tree,” my friend Sandy said.  “It’s so huge you’ll always be worried when you back out, and therefore you’ll never hit it.”

She was right.  Though trepidation guided the first times Duane and I eased out of the driveway, the old house charmed us.  We became its proud new owners and grew accustomed to maneuvering our driveway, though visitors avoided anxiety by parking on the street.

Years passed with substantive house restoration.  Our house became a home.  In pleasant weather, we enjoyed lunches and suppers on the front porch, greeting neighbors as they passed by.  I adored our maple tree for its wide arms that shaded our front lawn each summer, for its glorious shades of yellow leaves in autumn, sunlit against the sky before they cascaded down, and for the artistry of its dark branches that laced the winter clouds.

Then one summer, a storm blew through town and tore one of the muscled limbs from our tree.  The giant limb fell along the curb strip, its long branches extending into the street.  Traffic stopped to survey the wreckage.  Neighbors and passersby helped my husband and father-in-law clean up the damage.  Though our front curb was no longer shaded, the tree survived and managed to shade the rest of our lawn.  Years passed.  More branches and limbs fell during storms, but the tree persevered.  Because it grew along the curb, the city was responsible for trimming its broken branches.  One year, the clean-up crew told me they should take down the tree.

“Do you have to?” I pleaded.

“Well, maybe not yet,” they relented.

More years passed.  More limbs and branches fell, and more pleading and relenting reprieved the tree.  Finally one spring, only a few leaves grew in, long after the other trees on our block had turned green.  Duane and I surveyed the bare branches in mid-summer and knew we had to let our tree go.  The crew came and cut down the remaining branches until only the trunk remained and two limbs sticking up in the air as if the tree had surrendered.  I thought my heart would break.

I couldn’t watch the final removal of the trunk and roots, but in later weeks as I mourned the empty hole on our front curb and gaping space in the sky, I knew we should plant another tree as soon as possible.  I called our city parks manager.

“I’m getting a shipment of red maples,” he said.  “Would you like one?”

The crew came to plant our new tree one bright autumn day.  I ran outside with a plate of cookies, bubbling with questions about care and maintenance as they planted the six-foot tree a few feet from the end of our driveway.  I touched its slim silvery trunk and realized how many years it’d take before the tree would grow tall enough to shade our lawn.  But its spritely branches claimed my heart, simply with its promise that it would grow.

Our beautiful new maple grew several inches those first few months, and that spring, I found myself looking not at the wide space in the sky once filled with leaves and limbs but straight ahead at the branches blossoming in front of me.  May the wind blow gently upon them.

Suggested reading: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

My grandparent’s home was a place of refuge for me as a child, and trips north to their family’s cottage at Houghton Lake brought much needed respite to my heart.  I loved listening to stories of my grandma’s childhood which were unfortunately filled with tragedy.  I must have found courage in her ability to survive those dark years.  She was strong and opinionated and loved me deeply.  She often said she loved me “more than the whole blue sky.”

My grandpa was good-humored and fun.  He taught me to play Euchre, a card game I still love, and we played many games for nearly 40 years.  He also taught me to fish, and we went out on his boat at Houghton Lake for hours of casting and sometimes catching fish.  Though I’m vegetarian now, threading a worm on a hook and pulling a fish out of water thrilled me when I was young.

After my family moved from Michigan to Massachusetts, my grandma came to visit, and one afternoon we lay side by side on my bed.  She traced my face with her fingertips, over my forehead, and down the tip of my nose and chin.  When I asked why, she said it was so she could remember me just as I was after she returned home.  In that powerful moment I realized she missed me as deeply as I missed her.

I feel a powerful connection to the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, especially the scenes when Peggy Sue goes back in time to visit her grandparents.  I was incredibly blessed to have my grandparents until I was in my mid-forties.  Even then, I did not want to let go. I still miss them both so much it takes my breath away.

John Corey Whaley.  Thank you for writing another book.  Noggin captured me from the first page, though I had to let go of my memories of reading Where Things Come Back and immerse myself in a completely different story.  Where Things Come Back was the kind of story, when I finished, I went back to the beginning and read all over again.  Other people have mentioned this in reviews, but so far I haven’t found anyone else having the same reason I had to read it again.  Spoiler alert.  When I read the end of Where Things Come Back, I wasn’t sure if the ending was happy or incredibly sad.  Most people who read it seem to think it’s happy.  Maybe that’s what Whaley intended.  But there were clues along the way that could make the ending sad.  When I re-read the book, I wrote all the clues down, studied them, and still didn’t know which way the ending went.  That’s ok with me.  I like being able to see it both ways.

Noggin is not happily ever after, either, but we have the feeling Travis will find his way.  A truly gifted writer (Whaley certainly is one) resonates with lots of people in different ways.  The most emotional scene for me in Noggin was when Travis held the hand of the little sister whose brother’s body was now Travis’s (you’ll have to read the book to understand what this is all about):

I looked over at her and I swear I felt something I’ve never felt before.  I felt like I knew this little kid, like I’d heard her voice before and felt her little hand in mine and seen her smile in the sunlight like that.  It was so familiar to me, and despite being completely absurd and illogical, I knew in that moment that I was not just Travis Coates who died and came back from the dead.  I was the older brother who she lost. (p.332)

I experienced something mystical like this years ago when one of my daughter’s classmates lost her mother.  One day at the high school parking lot while waiting to pick up my daughter, I saw this girl walking with her friends, and for a few moments I suddenly felt as if I was watching her through the eyes of her mother, as if her mother had taken over my eyesight to simply see her daughter being okay, being able to talk with friends, being able to laugh again.  I could not turn away from watching this girl through the sensation of her mother’s eyes, and just as I was wondering if I should get out of the car and follow the girl, a feeling of relief came over me, of the mother letting go.

Author Kate DiCamillo, in her 2014 Newbery medal acceptance speech, told of how, "[i]n the week after my mother died, I heard her say my name.  It was just once, and I was asleep.  The sound of her calling for me woke me up.  Her voice was younger, impatient, certain, hopeful.  It was the sound of her standing on the front porch steps, calling for me at dusk."

Mystical experiences like these, our most real moments of life, are never forgotten.  Artist Wanda Collins Johnson says, “Art is my way of keeping a record of the mystery of life…”  In his book, Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime, Roger Housden says, "Moments like these pass, but they leave a trace on the air we breathe.  I do not believe we are ever quite the same again, however transitory their visitations, however completely the everyday world seems to reassert itself (36)."

John Corey Whaley.  Thank you for keeping a record of the mystery of life. I hope you’re busy writing another book…