Waiting (and waiting) won't bring about change
April 6, 2007
The thing with government reports is that I very often agree with them, sometimes even wholeheartedly.
I’ve seen my share of reports in 25 years of journalism, a lot of them bang on. Royal commission reports are particularly insightful, their authors having put serious time into studying every facet of the problem at hand.
But the unfortunate truth of reports and royal commissions is that we tend to ignore them. We send our best fact-finders out on noble missions of getting to the root of what ails us, then leave their recommendations to gather dust.
Sure, there’s a flurry of interest when a report first comes out, and a genuine intent to follow through. Within a year, however, we’re already losing interest; at the two-year mark, most of us will have forgotten that there ever was a report, at least until some other report comes to the identical conclusions a decade or so later.
Aboriginals failing in school. Children in government care. A better life for people with mental illness. An improved health-care system. A better way to help our kids learn. I’d be hard-pressed to tally all the major Canadian studies I’ve seen come and go in the last couple of decades.
A lot of them were powerful calls for transformation. I sat nodding my head in emphatic agreement through page after page of reports like B.C.’s royal commissions on health and education, or the marvelous Tom Gove report on reforming the way we look after children in care.
Hardly surprising, I suppose. The way to solve a problem is to understand every facet of it, and that’s exactly what royal commissions and other big reports set out to do.
But why do we so rarely take their advice?
One of our primary problems is an inability to focus long enough on an issue to get the job done. Big issues take big solutions, not teeny-tiny strategies mapped out a year at a time.
We also let political parties hijack the public agenda. We end up talking about what the parties feel like talking about, which leaves us lurching from one disjointed strategy to another in the artificial four-year cycle created by our election process.
It’s a disastrous approach when it comes to complex problems requiring patience, support and vision to solve.
One moment, we’re inching closer to finally getting a grip on the ridiculous way we deal with addiction. The next, Vancouver’s safe-injection site is being threatened with closure and Victoria’s main needle exchange is being run out of town.
One day, we’re wiping away tears over some poor little sod killed while in government care. The next, it’s 10 anguished years later and we’re still crying.
I wish I could tell myself I’m just aging into cynicism. But I’ve read the reports, and gone on to live in the brand new world that was supposedly going to result from them. And for the most part, not much changes.
Our national paralysis has us frozen up on some pretty frightening fronts.
By never following through on what our own reports and royal commissions have told us, we’ve actively created the kinds of deep-rooted problems that our country used to be proud not to have. We’re following countries like the U.S. into a mire of social problems and overflowing prisons, and class-based systems of care and schooling.
The worst of it is that we’re walking straight into it, undeterred by the living example of flawed social strategies unfolding in the country just south of us. Their reports have told them to do things differently as well, of course, for many years. But they haven’t, and it shows.
Even 20 years ago, could we have imagined a day when U.S. children would be walking through metal detectors to make sure they weren’t carrying guns? Or when poor, rural Midwesterners in states like Missouri and Iowa would be cited as one of the risk groups for high rates of crystal-methamphetamine use? Isn’t that enough to tell us there’s a high price to pay for getting this stuff wrong?
What it underlines for me is that change won’t come from the top down. Our governments may write a nice report, but the push has to start coming from the people if we ever want to see real change. Shuffling down to the polling booth once every four years just isn’t going to do it.
Where to start?
Pick an issue that’s really bugging you, and go learn something new about it. Track down the series of reports that were almost certainly written about it, and figure out a way to act on whatever part of the solution is within your grasp. Like the late Jerry Garcia tried to tell us, we’ve got to do more than just grumble that “somebody ought to do something about that.”
Sure, they ought to. But they aren’t. So it’s going to have to be us.
Monday, April 09, 2007
True tolerance much deeper than word choice
March 30, 2007
While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word.
Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether.
A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred.
The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things.
The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their ability to wound.
So it wouldn’t have helped her to live in a town where “chink” was banned (sorry, Mom), because the people who wanted to put her down would have merely pulled some other term from the air to make her feel small, shamed and different. Words were just the way to deliver the message.
The latest invective making headlines is “faggot,” which is apparently undergoing something of a resurgence among those who never quite signed on to the gay-rights movement.
All of a sudden, TV stars are hurling the term at co-workers, and tiresome U.S. commentator Ann Coulter is tossing it around in her public addresses.
As discouraging as it is to hear that people are still making comments like that without so much as a wince, the debate around word use is at least stirring up some discussion around the racism and homophobia at the root of the name-calling.
That’s where we want to be putting our attention.
The thing about name-calling is that it’s much harder to do once you know and like somebody who fits in the category. You’re not likely to call your gay friend a faggot, unless you’re gay yourself.
(Pejoratives used by “insiders” are more about being in the club, not about trying to put a person down.)
As a kid, for instance, it was easy for me to join everybody else in speculating on the “retards” who took classes in some distant wing far away from the rest of us. But then my class spent some time teaching those same kids how to play the recorder, and I got to know the people at the other end of that label.
And that was that. I suspect it would go that way most times if we had the chance to get to know each other as people. Ultimately, that’s the challenge: To open ourselves to meeting people who aren’t like us, and seeing how very much like us they actually are.
Doing something about that hasn’t exactly been a government priority in the last few years anywhere in North America. I can’t remember the last time I saw a campaign pitching diversity and tolerance with any more depth than a Benetton ad, or a public undertaking aimed at bridging the cultural gaps that separate us.
Homophobia in particular has yet to have its day, which I guess is how you end up with some retired U.S. basketball player musing on-air about how he’d like to see all homosexuals removed from the world.
Could he have possibly made such an outlandish comment if he’d known some of the people he was talking about - or at least been aware of how many gay people he probably already knows and likes?
So if we’re calling people names these days, perhaps it’s because we don’t have a clue about each other. We’re busy sorting people based on skin type, sexual preference, and skewed news coverage that leaves us suspecting that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and all aboriginals unemployed and incompetent.
Banning the n-word or any other pejorative can never get at that. No, that one’s going to have to be about getting beyond our significant cultural divides. Canada has prided itself on its multiculturalism, but the truth is that our country badly needs a long-term strategy to keep our many solitudes unified and respectful of each other.
Folkfest was one such tiny opportunity in our own community.
The demise of the annual event this year, and the Latin Music Festival as well, signals a loss of much more than interesting music and good food. Such events were among the few to draw people from across a wide cultural experience to celebrate each other’s differences.
Getting at racism, homophobia and all those other “isms” comes down to sharing common experience. Ugly words will stop when we get to the root of why we use them.
March 30, 2007
While there’s something charming about New York City’s new ban on the use of the “n-word,” the problem is that those who want to say ugly things will just find a new word.
Most recently it’s been former Seinfeld star Michael Richards wearing it for using the word, which he hurled with considerable racist invective at some poor black guy who heckled him during one of his comedy performances a few months ago. In the ensuing fallout, New York City decided to ban the n-word altogether.
A nice show of brotherhood. But if a community really wants to fix the problem that Richards’ rant brought to light, it takes getting at the underlying reasons for why people are so quickly given to judgment and hatred.
The words being used? They come and go, barely mattering in the grand scheme of things.
The hurtful words my mother once endured due to being half-Chinese were endlessly variable, and were valued by those who used them for their ability to wound.
So it wouldn’t have helped her to live in a town where “chink” was banned (sorry, Mom), because the people who wanted to put her down would have merely pulled some other term from the air to make her feel small, shamed and different. Words were just the way to deliver the message.
The latest invective making headlines is “faggot,” which is apparently undergoing something of a resurgence among those who never quite signed on to the gay-rights movement.
All of a sudden, TV stars are hurling the term at co-workers, and tiresome U.S. commentator Ann Coulter is tossing it around in her public addresses.
As discouraging as it is to hear that people are still making comments like that without so much as a wince, the debate around word use is at least stirring up some discussion around the racism and homophobia at the root of the name-calling.
That’s where we want to be putting our attention.
The thing about name-calling is that it’s much harder to do once you know and like somebody who fits in the category. You’re not likely to call your gay friend a faggot, unless you’re gay yourself.
(Pejoratives used by “insiders” are more about being in the club, not about trying to put a person down.)
As a kid, for instance, it was easy for me to join everybody else in speculating on the “retards” who took classes in some distant wing far away from the rest of us. But then my class spent some time teaching those same kids how to play the recorder, and I got to know the people at the other end of that label.
And that was that. I suspect it would go that way most times if we had the chance to get to know each other as people. Ultimately, that’s the challenge: To open ourselves to meeting people who aren’t like us, and seeing how very much like us they actually are.
Doing something about that hasn’t exactly been a government priority in the last few years anywhere in North America. I can’t remember the last time I saw a campaign pitching diversity and tolerance with any more depth than a Benetton ad, or a public undertaking aimed at bridging the cultural gaps that separate us.
Homophobia in particular has yet to have its day, which I guess is how you end up with some retired U.S. basketball player musing on-air about how he’d like to see all homosexuals removed from the world.
Could he have possibly made such an outlandish comment if he’d known some of the people he was talking about - or at least been aware of how many gay people he probably already knows and likes?
So if we’re calling people names these days, perhaps it’s because we don’t have a clue about each other. We’re busy sorting people based on skin type, sexual preference, and skewed news coverage that leaves us suspecting that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and all aboriginals unemployed and incompetent.
Banning the n-word or any other pejorative can never get at that. No, that one’s going to have to be about getting beyond our significant cultural divides. Canada has prided itself on its multiculturalism, but the truth is that our country badly needs a long-term strategy to keep our many solitudes unified and respectful of each other.
Folkfest was one such tiny opportunity in our own community.
The demise of the annual event this year, and the Latin Music Festival as well, signals a loss of much more than interesting music and good food. Such events were among the few to draw people from across a wide cultural experience to celebrate each other’s differences.
Getting at racism, homophobia and all those other “isms” comes down to sharing common experience. Ugly words will stop when we get to the root of why we use them.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
B.C.'s homeless strategy is all talk and little action
March 23, 2007
We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative.
The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good.
It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns.
Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the rental market.
In our region, almost 1,200 people are homeless or very close to it. Thousands more are scratching by in sub-par housing, at least until the health authorities or the landlord show up to shut the place down.
So 1,300 units of affordable housing province-wide may be laudable, but it barely scratches the surface. Rent top-ups to working families earning less than $20,000 a year are great too, but doesn’t do a thing for people at the very bottom.
I’ve been close to the street scene through my non-profit work for the entire three years that there has been a homelessness initiative. All I’ve seen is worsening problems.
You know those gloomy media stories about homelessness and addiction that you’d rather not read because they bum you out? I’m hear to tell you that they’ve got nothing on the real thing. The growing violence, the increase in street prostitution, the infections and overdoses and assorted daily tragedies of life on the streets - it’s all unbearably sad, and all the more so because it’s so completely unnecessary.
Can we live with knowing that pregnant women are living on our streets? That they give birth to embattled babies whose own young lives are then begun in foster homes and state care?
Probably not, at least in theory. In reality, a dozen or more such pregnant women are living on our downtown streets at any given time. Their children know disadvantage and poverty before they’re ever born, and many start out their tiny lives fighting the drugs and alcohol that ravaged them prenatally.
The government apparently believes that between a quarter and a third of people on our streets are mentally ill. I think they’d be wise to check those figures. Fortunately, it won’t take an expensive study or a royal commission or anything like that. A few hours hanging around the sidewalk outside Streetlink ought to do it.
Once upon a time, when B.C.’s big institutions closed down and disgorged people onto the streets, the solution might have been to get people some mental-health services and a cheap apartment.
But people with mental illnesses have been abandoned to the streets for too long now. They’ve got a way more complex set of problems, of which mental illness is only one. It’s going to take way more than 1,300 housing units and a handful of outreach workers to do something meaningful about that.
I spoke to a group of Grade 9-10 Parkland students a couple weeks ago about street issues, and it devastated me to realize that the region’s current street problems are seen as the norm among kids that age in our region. They’ve known nothing different.
I tried to tell them about how it had been in the “old days” - just 15 years ago, in fact, when Open Door clients comprised a small enough number that they fit comfortably in tiny digs above what is now the Metro Theatre.
These days, hundreds of people use the Open Door (now renamed Our Place). The little group of down-and-out men who made up the bulk of the region’s homeless population has transformed into a sprawling, brawling sub-class of almost 800 men, women and children, and hundreds more if you include the off-and-on homeless in the tally.
As tough as the challenges are due to our ongoing failure to act, the miseries of the street are within our capability to fix. We just need to solve the problem for what it is, and hopefully before it gets any bigger. If we applied even half the focus to addressing homelessness that we’re giving to staging the 2010 Olympics, we’d be operating at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of our actual progress.
Three years into B.C.’s homelessness initiative, we’ve gotten off to the smallest of starts. More, please - and very, very soon.
March 23, 2007
We’ll leave it to Arn Van Iersel to weigh in with the lowdown on how things are going with the province’s three-year-old homelessness initiative.
The acting auditor general is going to be reviewing the initiative to see whether it has been effective. But if Victoria’s downtown in that period is any measure, I’d have to guess the news from Van Iersel won’t be good.
It won’t be all bad, of course. Almost 1,300 units of subsidized and supported housing have been given the go-ahead since the launch of the 2004 strategy. And at least Port Alberni has a mental- health outreach worker, as promised to B.C. communities under the initiative but so far in place in barely a handful of towns.
Virtually any kind of affordable-housing initiative is a blessing in these unsettling times, marked at one end by the grim realities of nearly 800 people living on our streets, and at the other by sky-high housing prices that squeeze the rental market.
In our region, almost 1,200 people are homeless or very close to it. Thousands more are scratching by in sub-par housing, at least until the health authorities or the landlord show up to shut the place down.
So 1,300 units of affordable housing province-wide may be laudable, but it barely scratches the surface. Rent top-ups to working families earning less than $20,000 a year are great too, but doesn’t do a thing for people at the very bottom.
I’ve been close to the street scene through my non-profit work for the entire three years that there has been a homelessness initiative. All I’ve seen is worsening problems.
You know those gloomy media stories about homelessness and addiction that you’d rather not read because they bum you out? I’m hear to tell you that they’ve got nothing on the real thing. The growing violence, the increase in street prostitution, the infections and overdoses and assorted daily tragedies of life on the streets - it’s all unbearably sad, and all the more so because it’s so completely unnecessary.
Can we live with knowing that pregnant women are living on our streets? That they give birth to embattled babies whose own young lives are then begun in foster homes and state care?
Probably not, at least in theory. In reality, a dozen or more such pregnant women are living on our downtown streets at any given time. Their children know disadvantage and poverty before they’re ever born, and many start out their tiny lives fighting the drugs and alcohol that ravaged them prenatally.
The government apparently believes that between a quarter and a third of people on our streets are mentally ill. I think they’d be wise to check those figures. Fortunately, it won’t take an expensive study or a royal commission or anything like that. A few hours hanging around the sidewalk outside Streetlink ought to do it.
Once upon a time, when B.C.’s big institutions closed down and disgorged people onto the streets, the solution might have been to get people some mental-health services and a cheap apartment.
But people with mental illnesses have been abandoned to the streets for too long now. They’ve got a way more complex set of problems, of which mental illness is only one. It’s going to take way more than 1,300 housing units and a handful of outreach workers to do something meaningful about that.
I spoke to a group of Grade 9-10 Parkland students a couple weeks ago about street issues, and it devastated me to realize that the region’s current street problems are seen as the norm among kids that age in our region. They’ve known nothing different.
I tried to tell them about how it had been in the “old days” - just 15 years ago, in fact, when Open Door clients comprised a small enough number that they fit comfortably in tiny digs above what is now the Metro Theatre.
These days, hundreds of people use the Open Door (now renamed Our Place). The little group of down-and-out men who made up the bulk of the region’s homeless population has transformed into a sprawling, brawling sub-class of almost 800 men, women and children, and hundreds more if you include the off-and-on homeless in the tally.
As tough as the challenges are due to our ongoing failure to act, the miseries of the street are within our capability to fix. We just need to solve the problem for what it is, and hopefully before it gets any bigger. If we applied even half the focus to addressing homelessness that we’re giving to staging the 2010 Olympics, we’d be operating at warp speed compared to the glacial pace of our actual progress.
Three years into B.C.’s homelessness initiative, we’ve gotten off to the smallest of starts. More, please - and very, very soon.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control
March 16, 2007
I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care.
But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control.
As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls.
I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple.
Sure, girls in care probably don’t get enough of either of those. But all the sex ed and birth control in the world can’t get to the heart of the complicated reasons for teenage pregnancy.
The question is simple enough: Why would modern-day North American girls continue to get pregnant in these sexually saturated, birth-controlled times? Perhaps because the underlying reason has nothing to do with knowing how to prevent a pregnancy.
Teenagers have, of course, always gotten pregnant. As a teenage mom myself, I can’t help but bristle at the popular notion that nothing good comes from early motherhood.
What has changed since my time, however, is an end to societal expectations that young men should take some responsibility for that.
Nowadays, girls are pretty much on their own. Modern teen pregnancy has thus become synonymous with poverty, failure and struggle. But virtually all of us have teenage mothers in our own family backgrounds from the days when it was accepted and supported.
So part of what has to happen is just plain old support. If boys are no longer to be held to any expectation around support for the girls they get pregnant, then somebody else has to help make that happen.
On some theoretical level, I think that’s supposed to be government’s job, but I’ve seen little evidence of that to this point. While pregnant girls from financially stable families do OK under the new world order, girls from struggling, marginal families - or worse, from the shattered world of government care - can barely catch a break in these mean times.
It’s within our reach to do something about that virtually immediately, and we ought to. Nothing good comes from leaving pregnant girls and women to scratch by on a $500 welfare cheque. If we’re serious about doing something to slow the rising tide of broken people in our communities, one of the most vital populations to care for is pregnant women.
But teenage pregnancy is also about hope, and it’s that truth that I suspect will pose the biggest challenges in reducing high pregnancy rates among girls in care.
For those girls, getting pregnant is about creating somebody to love them just as they are. It’s about the dream of what it would feel like to have a family - something that many will have barely experienced. It’s about a new tomorrow, in a different and happier life.
Pregnancy for a kid growing up in struggling circumstance rarely turns out as happy as that, of course. But that’s where a girl’s heart leads her sometimes when there’s nothing else to hold onto. Preventing her pregnancy as a teenager is really about helping her feel loved, connected and supported as a child.
Trying to accomplish that under the current system of care in B.C. would be a monumental task, but hardly an unfamiliar one.
After all, tens of thousands of healthy families out there know exactly what it takes to ensure their own children don’t end up as single moms on a welfare cheque. Fewer girls in care will get pregnant when the system more closely models the attributes of a real family - not an easy transformation.
But here’s the good news: We’re doing things so poorly now, there’s nowhere to go but up. With Turpel-Lafond’s recent appointment, we have an opportunity to open up a conversation with the children and families entangled in our care system and figure out how to do it better.
It needn’t be an impossible undertaking. Every day, in every community in Canada, people are capably raising their children into healthy adulthood.
Surely it’s within our ability to design a system that recreates those same family models for struggling families and their children, building trust between child welfare workers and families rather than pitting them against each other.
So yes, let’s get those poor kids in care some more birth control. But first let’s try to give them a real family.
March 16, 2007
I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care.
But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control.
As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls.
I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple.
Sure, girls in care probably don’t get enough of either of those. But all the sex ed and birth control in the world can’t get to the heart of the complicated reasons for teenage pregnancy.
The question is simple enough: Why would modern-day North American girls continue to get pregnant in these sexually saturated, birth-controlled times? Perhaps because the underlying reason has nothing to do with knowing how to prevent a pregnancy.
Teenagers have, of course, always gotten pregnant. As a teenage mom myself, I can’t help but bristle at the popular notion that nothing good comes from early motherhood.
What has changed since my time, however, is an end to societal expectations that young men should take some responsibility for that.
Nowadays, girls are pretty much on their own. Modern teen pregnancy has thus become synonymous with poverty, failure and struggle. But virtually all of us have teenage mothers in our own family backgrounds from the days when it was accepted and supported.
So part of what has to happen is just plain old support. If boys are no longer to be held to any expectation around support for the girls they get pregnant, then somebody else has to help make that happen.
On some theoretical level, I think that’s supposed to be government’s job, but I’ve seen little evidence of that to this point. While pregnant girls from financially stable families do OK under the new world order, girls from struggling, marginal families - or worse, from the shattered world of government care - can barely catch a break in these mean times.
It’s within our reach to do something about that virtually immediately, and we ought to. Nothing good comes from leaving pregnant girls and women to scratch by on a $500 welfare cheque. If we’re serious about doing something to slow the rising tide of broken people in our communities, one of the most vital populations to care for is pregnant women.
But teenage pregnancy is also about hope, and it’s that truth that I suspect will pose the biggest challenges in reducing high pregnancy rates among girls in care.
For those girls, getting pregnant is about creating somebody to love them just as they are. It’s about the dream of what it would feel like to have a family - something that many will have barely experienced. It’s about a new tomorrow, in a different and happier life.
Pregnancy for a kid growing up in struggling circumstance rarely turns out as happy as that, of course. But that’s where a girl’s heart leads her sometimes when there’s nothing else to hold onto. Preventing her pregnancy as a teenager is really about helping her feel loved, connected and supported as a child.
Trying to accomplish that under the current system of care in B.C. would be a monumental task, but hardly an unfamiliar one.
After all, tens of thousands of healthy families out there know exactly what it takes to ensure their own children don’t end up as single moms on a welfare cheque. Fewer girls in care will get pregnant when the system more closely models the attributes of a real family - not an easy transformation.
But here’s the good news: We’re doing things so poorly now, there’s nowhere to go but up. With Turpel-Lafond’s recent appointment, we have an opportunity to open up a conversation with the children and families entangled in our care system and figure out how to do it better.
It needn’t be an impossible undertaking. Every day, in every community in Canada, people are capably raising their children into healthy adulthood.
Surely it’s within our ability to design a system that recreates those same family models for struggling families and their children, building trust between child welfare workers and families rather than pitting them against each other.
So yes, let’s get those poor kids in care some more birth control. But first let’s try to give them a real family.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
It all comes out in the wash
March 9, 2007
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
March 9, 2007
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
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