June 9, 2011

• Resuming where I left off…

  For a few years, I was posting episodes of my memoirs here almost daily.  I started in the middle of my life, wrote about a decade-and-a-half’s worth of it, up to 1975 in Anchorage, then focused on filling in my early years.  About three years ago, I drove my Golden Spike, linking the childhood and youth to the already written ‘sixties and ‘seventies, with an episode set in Tacoma, WA, 1961.

  That stuff that happened fifty years ago turned out to be easier to remember and write about than things that happened more recently.  I got stuck, not only on memory but on the sensitivity of some of the material — or, rather, the sensitivities of some of the people involved.

  I couldn’t figure out how to go on being as frank and honest about my life in that time as I had been about the previous part, without risking getting killed, or at least maimed, or maybe only despised and ostracized, for it.  I backed off, scared.

  I can’t change the three years of memoir writing time I lost that way, but I can face the fear, blow a big raspberry in its face, and get on with the job.

  Stay tuned for further developments.  I’m back.
  
  It is important to me to illustrate my memoirs with photos whenever such photos exist.  Many do exist for the period of time I’ll be writing about next, but I have no scanner now, no way to get them onto these pages.  If you would be so kind as to contribute a little something to the purchase of a new scanner, please drop a little something in my old purple PayPal hat, below.

  
  

  • 4:37 pm
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