One cold January morning, as I pulled my car around the corner of my office building, I was struck by a memory of one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had in my practice with the homeless.
Category: We’re all stories in the end
Stories I don’t want to lose
Song as a Memory Finder
This week, there is a prompt about a song that really affects us, and while I don’t have the obsession over music that some people have, I do have one song that… I don’t know. I have a visceral reaction to it. The first 20 seconds of Pearl Jam’s “Nothingman,” affects me like I didn’t know a song could. Even as I listen right now, as I sit here and write this… My heart clutches and it’s hard to breathe. I close my eyes and shudder a bit. I feel like a balloon with the air suddenly sucked out.
No matter where I am or what I’m doing, when I hear this song, I’m immediately back in a darkened house in the dark wee hours of the morning. I was a different person that night and at that point in my life. Though I didn’t know it then, it was the lowest I would ever be – the night before the accident. The accident that nearly killed me. The accident I would give anything to have not had.
To Hear The Poem of Creation
Remember the first time I traveled solo.
And I mean solo, really solo. I had taken a trip to San Francisco by-myself-but-with-others with Team in Training to do the Nike Women’s Marathon, and that was pretty cool. I went with other people to appease worried family members. But, in the spring of ’08, before I started my Master’s that fall, I wanted to go abroad. The problem was, nobody wanted to go with me. Rather, they did, but they didn’t have the money or the vacation time to do it, and they didn’t really have an interest in seeing what I wanted to see.
Remember the time… Top three childhood memory pins
I have a board on Pinterest called “Childhood memories,” on which I pin things that, not surprisingly, remind me of my childhood. They usually bring back strong and compelling memories, things I haven’t thought of in a long ass time.
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Remember the time… I got really scared
The time I got the most scared. I was a kid, it was the summer after 7th grade. One day, I went to the theater (something we could never afford to do) to watch the movie “Aracnophobia” with a girlfriend. We got movie treats before we went, and I bought Mamba. Then I spent the afternoon at her house, something I loved to do because she had such a beautiful house and she had so many sisters, so there was always a lot of things going on.
Cool Songs for Cool Kids
“Here. I made you a mix tape.”
Wow. What would I put on a mix tape for a new friend – this is an important question. Making a mix tape has never been a joke; it’s a serious business. It not only comments on you, but it also communicates some assumptions to the person to whom you’re giving the tape.
First, what length tape will you give them? 30 minutes a side? 45 minutes a side? I think there were even some tapes that were an hour on each side. Then, you need the right equipment. You can’t record off the radio onto a mix tape. No. The whole point of a mix tape is that the person have the whole song, unadulterated by radio personality bla-di-blah. So you have to take it directly off the CD or another cassette (that doesn’t have radio crap on it.) If you don’t have a clean version, don’t add it.
Here’s what I’d put:
Remember the time… I only wanted to be with you?
I am now coming to an age when I have lots of memories, like a basket of chestnuts to turn over a bored fire. Some memories are painfully embarrassing, though I suppose I should enjoy it though; this is the marrow of my life, and those days are not coming back. Which is sometimes for the better, as there are certain things I don’t need to live twice.
Like the first concert I went to….
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I Didn't Just Wake Up This Morning With A Craving 