On With Your Story

She must NOT be writing a memoir! The baby would be crying and the counter would be full of dishes, don't you think?

I can hear you. You want to write a memoir. You know the material well-after all you lived it. You’ve thought about it for years, even started writing-several times. What’s holding you back?

Paul Graham puts his finger on a big part of the problem in a July 2009 essay he calls “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” Of course, he is writing mostly about computer programming, not memoir writing. But programmers have something in common with writers. Their tasks are difficult and take time. Graham knows all about this because he is both a writer and a programmer.

Manager-type schedules break the day up into one-hour increments. Makers, such as memoir writers, can’t even get started in one hour, let along make any progress. They need much bigger hunks of time. “A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in,” says Graham. Hasn’t this happened to you? You work a manager’s schedule all day and in the evenings you have other things that need tending. You can’t find four uninterrupted hours together, what with school activities, committee meetings, picking up the dry cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, washing, etc, etc, etc.

To get his “making” done, Graham goes so far devise this solution:

“I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.” I would guess that Graham was single at the time.

As for me, I write from 5 to 9 AM, and I try to schedule meetings after 2 PM.

Some writer’s seem to be able to work in smaller blocks of time. I recall Jim Lehrer saying in an interview that he writes on airplane flights, but maybe he meant 7-hour flights to Europe.

If you are working on a memoir or family history, when do you write? How do you manage the demands of the “manager’s schedule” and the “maker’s schedule?”

Listening, really listening, is the best gift we can give to others. But it is remarkably difficult to do. If you are contemplating interviewing someone for a personal or family history project, a brush up on listening skills can help make the experience rewarding for both of you. The guidance about active listening provided in this “Care Pages” post, while intended for people in crisis, applies as well to all interviewing situations.  “Tell me more” is the magic interview question.

Earthrise from the moon. Taken by Apollo 11.

Forty years ago today I was one kid doing the same thing that millions of other people in the world were doing at the same time. Watching breathlessly as Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Two men walked on the moon’s surface, while one orbited alone above them. They are famous and will be remembered down through history. But behind them were 400,000 mostly nameless people who also made the moon landing possible. They included scientists and engineers who designed rockets and computers that had never been thought of before, but also “little old ladies” (LOL, NASA’s informal term for them) who wove cables.

That historic event changed how we view our home planet and changed our notion of what is humanly possible. I think we were all part of that history, in our own ways.

One of my favorite movies is “The Dish” a fun, celebratory little movie about the hopes, insecurities, and mistakes of the men of the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. Without these ordinary men, the world would not have seen Armstrong’s giant step. I love that movie because it reminds us that we are all the heartbeat of history. I’ve seen it four or five times and I never tire of it. You can rent it from Netflix.

“What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth.” Norman Cousins

If you saw the moon landing, what do you remember?

My wedding anniversary is today. On this day in the year I married, the song “Shadow Dancing” by Andy Gibb was the No. 1 song, according to Billboard magazine. How do I know this? I looked it up on the Internet, of course. On the website, THE #1 SONG ON THIS DATE IN HISTORY, you can look up the top song for any date going back to the 1890s. Links for listening are provided as well for songs that date back to the 1940s. What song was popular on the day you married or on the day your parents married? Look it up and let me know.

If you want to hear and see Andy Gibb sing “Shadow Dancing,” try this video from YouTube:

It’s June, wedding season. Brides who spent months meticulously planning every moment are now encountering the unexpected. Things go wrong at weddings. At least, I hope so, within reason.

“Sometimes, the unexpected and offbeat make for the most fun memories and stories for grandkids in years to come.” So says yesterday’s article in the Walton Sun, “Weddings Sometimes Go Awry,” where you can read about some wedding glitches that have become etched into family lore.

Take my wedding for instance. I had pneumonia on my big day! The wedding went on anyway and 30 years later we joke about testing the “in sickness and in health” part of the vows a bit early. I’ll always remember how my new husband took me home, gave me my cough medicine, helped me into bed and slept on the sofa. Having pneumonia is what sets my wedding off from every other wedding in my experience. I got extra attention that day and to this day my children tell the story. My daughter is in the throes of planning her wedding–for September–down to minute detail. My hope for her is to have something unexpected happen that makes a good story and her wedding day truly memorable.

Did you have a “perfect” wedding or did something go awry that made family history?

“What has rapidly become one of the hottest events in town… The Moth is an evening of unashamedly old-fashioned storytelling… The performances are enthralling, funny and moving, with a typical New York intensity.” -The Times (London). You can listen to well-told personal stories here and subscribe to podcasts.

The Genealogue is treasury of off-beat news about births, deaths, marriages, and other genealogy-related tidbits. This quirky and diverting blog is brought to us by Chris Dunham, a self-described “unprofessional genealogist.” I’m following him on Twitter now.  When you visit, check out the link to the Genealogy Blog Finder which tracks, the last time I checked, 1,365 genealogy blogs. This is a serious resource for genealogy buffs.

There are many ways that people can tell their stories.

In one way, eight amateur clowns capered in the small performance space above Gigler’s Auto Body Shop on 19th Street in San Francisco before an audience of friends and family. (Under the circumstance, I really hope the name of shop is pronounced “gigglers!”). The show,”Clown Meltdown,” culminated months of work in Clown School, taught by Christina Lewis, who has studied clowning and performed as a clown in Europe, Mexico, and the United States.

Each of the evening’s eight performers had developed a uniquely personal clown character and a skit that told a story that was both deeply personal and universally recognizable. One muscular clown lovingly stroked his orange cone hat and sighed deeply with satisfaction. Then he was tempted from off stage by hands offering more and more orange cones. These he added to his body one by one, happy anew with each acquisition. By the end of the skit, he could hardly move, and in the end, he took off the original orange cone hat and held it ruefully to his cheek. The quest for more and more hadn’t brought this clown any more happiness than he started with.

In another act, a petite clown in a baggy black dress and red and yellow socks tried over and over to make it across the stage, hiding behind a series of screens that got smaller with each zany attempt. She finally succeeded, joyously and triumphantly, by banishing a clown chorus of hecklers and naysayers.

One after another the clowns mimed and danced stories from their hearts and experience, taking risks to tell their serious stories through play. I wish I had a better pic to do justice to the lively and intimate performance shared by a small community of people.

 A steady flow of cars entered and exited the open iron gates of Golden Gate National Cemetery this afternoon.  

My father, Richard C. Simmons, Jr., a World War II veteran, is interred there, along with my mother, in the company of 139,037 other souls. He shares the hallowed soil with Admiral Chester Nimitz and Private First Class Harold Gonsalves, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. There are 15 Medal of Honor recipients buried at Golden Gate.

Memorial Day commemorates men and women who died in U.S. military service. My father didn’t die in his war, but I took the ceremonial occasion to visit my parents’ graveside. Many other people were there, too, all separately paying their respects to someone. A young father pointed out a marker to his boy on the same slope where my parents rest. Two women sat on the grass in front of a grave stone. A family circled another one. A man about my husband’s age, wearing camouflage pants, stood overlooking a section filled with the fallen from 1967.

My husband survived his war, Vietnam. One who did not survive his war was Kenneth H. Ramsey, my mother’s brother, but he has no grave to visit. He was lost in a torpedo bomber in the South Pacific in 1944. He left no children and everyone within my knowledge who knew him is gone now too. Who do you want to remember this Memorial Day?

One picture may be worth a thousand words, but some photos are almost worthless without a few words to identify them.  

I found this mystery photo after my grandmother Elizabeth died. Born in 1903 in Oklahoma, she lived an interesting and paripetetic life until settling down in Spokane, Washington in 1943. She moved from place to place with her children during the Great Depression, as my grandfather went from job to job. Before that, her father, a Presbyterian minister, moved his family from church to church in Oklahoma, Kansas, and California. Somewhere along the way, this photo may have been taken. She may be one of the children pictured. From the flat landscape, they may be somewhere in Oklahoma. The point is, I don’t know.

My grandmother left no information to indicate why she possessed this photograph and had kept it for the nearly 100 years that she lived. The questions I have about this mysterious photo are ones we should answer about all the significant photographs we leave for others to find:

• Who are the people in the picture?
• What is their relationship to the photo owner?
• Who took the photograph?
• Where was the picture taken? In what country and state? Near what town?
• When was the picture taken? 
• What was the occasion of the picture? In this case, where had they come from? Where were they going? Why were they on the road? Why did they stop here?

Maybe the Photo Detective, Maureen Taylor, can provide some answers about my mystery photograph. I’ve sent it to her, and if she discovers anything, I will fill you in.