In the Middle of Things
Or, where to start when there's no beginning...
Hello, Gentle Reader! Welcome to my new(s)letter on a subject as tangled as the skein-ends of yarn I’ve toted around for half a lifetime now: the knotty strands of identity and heredity. Here, every couple of weeks or so, I’ll be probing the provenances of selfhood’s heirlooms, using memoir as a window onto the times, places, items, and people that crowd my mind and make me who I am. Maybe you’ll see yourself here, too, and maybe you’ll gain some insight, some amusement, and a bit of consolation that the ties that bind us are real and strong, if a bit of a mess.
Students in literature classes learn about story structures—chronological narrative, of course, bookends, flashbacks, and that ancient classic, in medias res, the story that starts in the middle of the action, figuring out as it goes along how to explain what has already happened. They’re all constructs, containers we try to catch the messy details in to make them make sense, but doesn’t in medias res feel the most like how life works? Like how I wake up every morning and the dog stretches himself out of bed and trots downstairs as if heading off to work on a schedule, “hey lady! where’s my breakfast?” and I follow, because it seems like I’m supposed to, because the dog seems to know something about where I’ve been and where I’m going, and sure enough, there are last night’s dishes all clean in the dishwasher, the grackles on the feeder throwing sunflower seed shells all over everywhere, a stack of partially read books, dirty socks under the chair, and a fragrance from the downstairs-neighbor’s adventurous home-cooking permeating the hallway and seeping into my space. I woke up to this place, arrived in this here and now, and there are so many ways to account for how.
One thread of the whole cloth, just one, is spun of DNA that’s full of mysteries and well-known features. One is made of the stream of words adults said to me when I was a child (whether they knew I was listening or not). One is formed of actual materials—my father’s hand-me-down fountain pens, my mother’s hand-knitted lace shawls, my grandmother’s ruby ring. There are the hours spent in the company of other children in a schoolhouse that was torn down and replaced forty years ago, its polished wood floors and cathedral-sized windows lodged only in my memory and that of a few— hundred? thousand?—others. There are the expectations, spoken or illustrated, of adult relatives, friends, teachers, that gave permission or warned me away from unadvisable paths. There are those paths, most now only imagined, that show up sometimes as visions, asking, what if you were here, instead? These are inheritances that I’m somehow formed of, that have transported me here to scoop a blob of canned meat into the dog’s bowl again, mushing in some kibble for crunch because that’s the way he likes it, to peer out the picture window umpteen times a day to watch the fledgling chickadee triplets and a baby squirrel we’ve dubbed Son of Scar chowing down like teenagers at the all-you-can-eat buffet (Momma Scar still comes for a bite, too, but she’s not so ravenous anymore).
How do I get to be myself, collage that I am? How did you find your way to yourself?How does a person transform their history into selfhood, and how stable a thing, anyhow, is selfhood? This is what I wonder and will continue wondering. Here’s a place to start, an essay from my memoir-in-progrees, published in the fabulous Vincent Brothers Review, in which I wonder what a particular heirloom has come to mean in my life:
Yeah! Congrats on the start of this journey! 👏😊