The Experimental Memoir - Day 1
I am not an English lady, preparing a party and planning on getting the flowers myself. I am not an Irishman spending a day in Dublin. I am not writing across the country with my son on the back of my motorcycle as I hunt for the ghosts of my past, or driving a van on the blue highways.
No, I am a grey bearded blogger sitting a cluttered office of a small house on the outskirts of New Haven, CT. I am setting off on my own journey, an experimental version of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, strongly influenced by these characters from great literature.
Every November, aspiring novelists from around the world sit down and try to write a novel of at least fifty thousand words in one month. A key aspect of NaNoWriMo is to just write. Let the words flow, don’t edit. You can do the editing later. Usually, I edit my blog posts, and I’ll probably do a little editing as I write this experimental memoir, but only a little, so don’t be surprised if there are plenty of errors to be found, or other word crafting I should do at a later point.
I’ve made a few attempts at NaNoWriMo. The first year, I succeeded in a science fiction novel based on Second Life. It is sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Another year, I started off with a biographical novel, tracing my divorce and financial hardship, but it was too fresh, too raw, too close to home, and I set it aside before I got very far into the month. Instead, I picked up another science fiction theme, but I was too far behind to catch up, and abandoned it due to lack of time.
Last year, I was preparing to start a new job, and that didn’t seem like a great time to start a novel. So, here I am, starting off on the first day of November, 2011. I’m not sure where it will go, since you can never know what curves a month will through at you, but I have some general ideas.
The first question when writing a memoir is about how far to go back. I could start by talking about my memories as a child of falling asleep in my bed after eating various deserts. However, starting that far back would be more likely to lead to at least a three volume set, far beyond the scope of fifty thousand words. I could try to keep things focused on a single day. That would be a great challenge, but I worry about running out of words before the month is up.
Instead, I shall try to write about the days of the month as they pass, and perhaps include various memories throughout the month. With that, let me go off on my first tangential memory to explore another aspect of this project.
I think it was in a creative writing class back when I was in college, that I heard the story of Thomas Wolfe and his experiences writing Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. As I remember things, Wolfe came from a small town, and as much as he declaimed that the characters were fictional too many people saw themselves in the characters and were offended. For this project, I am planning on using real names of real people, but my memories may not be accurate and I may just make some stuff up for the fun of it. I’ll also leave out information that doesn’t make for a good story. Remember, this is fiction and not everything you read on the Internet is true.
With all of that out of the way, let me start off with the morning of November 1, 2011. At six A.M., the clock radio on the nightstand next to the bed went off. It is an old plastic Sony clock radio that I’ve had for many years. It is mostly brown, faintly resembling some sort of wood. The display is black plastic with blue LEDs. The LEDs can be set to dim or bright. I like the rooms I sleep in to be dark, so I have it set to DIM.
Money is still tight, and I’ve always been pretty frugal for a lot of different reasons, so the air in the room was cold. Some of my frugality comes from my upbringing. I was born in northern Maine, and have always had a pretty high tolerance for cold. When I was young, we didn’t have a lot of money so we kept the heat down low. As I became older, all of this melded into concerns about the environment and keeping my carbon footprint as small as possible.
A cold house is not that bad once you get used it and adjust your lifestyle accordingly. On the bed, we have a large pile of blankets and comforters and beneath it all, it is can be quite toasty. When you are up, sweaters, blankets and terry cloth bathrobes keep the chill away. The difficult time is the transitions. Getting out of bed, getting out of the shower, and getting dressed.
Of course this transition can provide a great disincentive to getting out of bed. This is compounded by it being dark at six a.m. I reached over to the clock radio and reset the alarm for seven. That is when Kim normally gets up. I rolled over and gathered my energy, and finally emerged from the warm cocoon of bed covers. I tried to be quite as I searched around for my bathrobe. Normally, I hang it in the bathroom after my shower. However, we had lost power during the freak October snowstorm, and it had been a few days since I had a shower, and the bathrobe had been moved from its usual place.
After wondering around upstairs for a while, I finally found my bathrobe in a clothes basket in the guest room. When we finish a load of laundry, we dump it on bed in the guest room, waiting to be folded and put away, or more likely to be pulled out of the pile and put on in the morning. It made sense that there was a laundry basket there and that my bathrobe had ended up in the basket.
The next part of my morning ritual is to head down stairs where Wesley our big fluffy dog, is waiting. We took Wesley in as a foster dog a little over a year ago. He is part Labrador retriever and part Great Pyrenees. He was a small puppy at the time and showed up with another puppy. The other puppy was quickly adopted, but Kim and Fiona lobbied for us to keep Wesley. Now, he must be over a hundred pounds, but still acts a bit like a young puppy. He wants to sit in people’s laps, even though he is now much larger than Fiona.
We have an invisible fence for him and when he was younger, we could let him out at six in the morning and he would go pee, sniff around, and come back in. Now, however, he has found his voice. If I let him out at six, he would run around the perimeter of the yard and bark and anything and everything that needs to be kept away. Not all the neighbors find this endearing, so I’ve taken to walking him on the leash first thing in the morning.
This morning, however, he didn’t want to go outside immediately. Instead, he trotted upstairs and hopped on the bed where I had been laying.
So, I continued with the next step in my morning ritual. On top of the small white microwave on a counter in the kitchen is normally a box of instant oatmeal. The box contains packets which contain an individual serving of oatmeal. I empty the packet into one of the white soup bowls that my first wife and I got as wedding presents over twenty five years ago.
The microwave also dates back several uncertain years. There is a larger built in microwave, but it has been unreliable so we don’t use it.
I don’t believe I have an obsessive compulsive disorder. However, there are certain idiosyncrasies that have developed over time. I tear the top off the packet of instant oatmeal and carefully sprinkle it into the bowl so that it is evenly distributed. I then pour a half cup of water from the water jug with the filter in it into a one cup Pyrex measuring cup. From the measuring cup, I carefully pour the water over the oatmeal, again, making sure that it is poured equally over all of the oatmeal.
It can be frustrating when the bathrobe is not where it should be in the bathroom. The same applies to dishes, and especially the measuring cup. It sets the day off on a bad note if the measuring cup isn’t clean, isn’t where it usually is, or if we are out of oatmeal.
I place the bowl of oatmeal in the microwave and set it for two minutes. During these two minutes, I get out a spoon and use it to measure coffee into a single serving coffee machine.
My oatmeal ritual developed on the recommendation of a doctor who noted that my cholesterol was a bit high. I also have high blood pressure, so I usually limit my coffee intake to a cup of black decaf each morning. This is part of the reason we make individual servings of coffee. Kim likes her caffeine.
If there is enough remaining time after I’ve set up the coffee, I do a little random cleaning around the kitchen, such as loading or unloading the dishwasher, or putting away larger dishes that are in the drying rack. When the timer beeps, I take my bowl of oatmeal out of the microwave and bring it into the office. There, I check various websites.
I check to see if I have any new notifications on Facebook or Twitter. I try to visit a bunch of blogs from various blog advertising networks like Adgitize and EntreCard. I check out my portfolio on Empire Avenue. If I have time and energy, I try to get a blog post up.
On the first of each month, I try to write a blog post with “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” in the title. I don’t remember exactly when I started this, but it harkens back to an old childhood story that if you say “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” as your first words at the beginning of a each month, it would bring good luck. I often use these blog posts to look back at the month that has just ended and forward to the month that is about to begin.