This is a story that my father’s mother carried home, ages ago. He passed details on to me decades back, and now I’m now sharing them with you. Maybe by the grace of time this story counts as legend or lore, but it would be a strange kind of lore, built with all the specificity coupled with casualness of a shopping list scrawled on a scrap. It’s ephemera of the mind, a fragment that has endured the ordinary kind of time travel, the sort we all make in our bodies, traveling only forward.
His mother used to earn a little cash by babysitting a houseful of kids down the street, down on the edge of Felony Flats, in what would later become Tonya Harding country, a sea of working-class bungalows holding families and love and fights and food and babies and the rest of what it means to be humans in the boxes of our homes, in a neighborhood punctuated by corner stores, traces of ghost signs painted on peeling outer walls, penny candy, quart beer, taverns and crumbling asphalt, sans sidewalks.
The mother down the street was overwhelmed. She had a pack of kids, perhaps five of them, all young, and too little money, she needed to work. My grandmother came home from babysitting one day and told her son about making sandwiches for those five kids. She’d found a shoelace inside a jar of peanut butter, the lace carefully coiled inside the jar as though wrapped there by the movement of a butterknife held in a hand before hers that had scraped the edges, leaving the lace stuck to the inside of the glass.
It’s a terrible detail, and brings on an instinctive response to balk at sketchy, dirty food. But it’s a compressed image, conveying an entire glimpse of existence: a cheap meal, too many appetites, a harried house, human struggles, no time to take care, no time to cook, making mistakes and stumbling forward, not deadly or dramatic mistakes, but steady and unsettling.
The shoelace is a snake coiled in the grass, the poverty of peanut butter, barely holding life together. I stand in empathy, not judgement. It was my grandmother’s landscape too, of course.
Decades later, my father would be back in the neighborhood as a parent himself, his children grown into adults. He’d see the woman, now a grandmother, maybe even a great grandmother, those years spent raising her own babies far in the past. She’d mention that she hoped to write a memoir. She’d heard that my father had become a writer. The woman brought over a few pages of her memoir-in-progress. She’d written about how beautiful life was, all laughter, canned jam and sunshine. “Where’s the shoelace in the peanut butter?” my father would say to me, later, talking about her pages, talking craft.
I believe in the beauty of daffodils as they caught sunlight near her front door, the love of her children and the blessings of her life. I’m sure whatever she wrote was based in memory and truth, as much as anything. So many details compete for attention that to describe even a moment becomes about selection and omission. But the shoelace in the peanut butter is the picture of hardship, parenting and children’s needs, and hardship is as real and significant as anything.
It’s a question of what we’re willing to talk about, what we choose, what we know and what truly feeds our spirit.
If she raised five children, she raised five different versions of the stories in that house, stories which dovetail and contradict each other, most likely.
There are times in life for shouting out, voicing dismay, then times for enjoying the grit, and other years built for remembering only the best moments of youth despite any other kind. It would be difficult to convey all the nuance and emotion of any given minute in a life, at once. There’s only selection, focus, meaning and memory. We choose our details, make sense of our existence.
We can support each other in our work, as writers and as beings, but we can’t prescribe another person’s lens, another’s frame. Our lives, eras and economics, may overlap; our memories and choices, aesthetic or otherwise, may not.
On the dedication page of Fear of Fifty, Erica Jong writes, “For my daughter, Molly—your turn now”. I have so much appreciation and respect for Erica Jong. She has a tremendous practice of writing memoir that reads like novels and novels that read as memoir, weaving across the line and back, keeping generations thrilled, enlightened and entertained. With that acknowledgement on the dedication page, she’s passing the baton—…as though…it is hers to pass…as though permission needs to be…given?
She writes, “At fourteen, Molly already knows that I’m her material, just as she sometimes has been mine. If she has to put up with a writer-mother, she’ll take her revenge with words.”
I can almost hear the author’s nervous laugh behind those words, feel an unease. She’s passing the baton, sure, but she’s also holding on and pulling it back. She’s already labeling and defining any future work of her child’s future adulthood. Revenge? There’s a joking quality to the word, perhaps with a hint of truth to it, but who knows?
She’s creating an equivalence that doesn’t hold up. To write as an adult about a child, while that person is still a child, grants the writer authority and control to an unfair degree. In the wrong hands, or hearts, a child’s being in a writer’s house could be a vulnerable spot. In terms of power and awareness, it is a very different vantage point than to write as a grown child about childhood, and perhaps mention the seemingly always-adult parent. Jong is granting permission while projecting an element of social stricture, control and her own wisdom over the future, whatever work her daughter crafts. She’s not really letting go at all, is she? She’s casting her influence forward, anxiously.
Fortunately, nobody needs to wait for permission, and there’s room for conflicting stories on the same shelf.
In the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick, (the basis of Blade Runner) the main character is sure he’s a human, rather than an android, for two reasons: he has memories of childhood, and he wants a living pet, meaning he’s capable of empathy. The androids he kills are said to lack empathy, and so he, in an ironic turn, has no empathy or sympathy for them. Another character suggests the main character’s childhood memories may not be memories at all, but rather programmed content, putting a tailspin on things. Our main character may be an unreliable narrator of his own life. It becomes potentially a metaphor: are our childhood memories ours, or were we “programmed” by repetition and family snapshots? If he can’t trust his memories, who is he? Does he know himself at all?
There are studies claiming that nearly all memories are faulty. There are studies showing how readily suggestion can change a person’s memory, and studies showing how, in certain situations, memory is crystal clear and unchanging over time:
…with memories of addiction and trauma, brain cells don’t form memories normally. Homing in on a brain region called the amygdala, which processes fear and other emotions, [scientists] discovered an important difference. In order to form new connections, proteins called actins inside the brain cell push the edges of the cell outward, growing new branches to reach other cells.
When healthy memories form, the actins stabilize and stop growing within a few minutes. But with addiction or trauma memories, the actins stay active, causing the connections to constantly strengthen and refresh.
Sometimes, the same people will assert that all memories are faulty, that suggestibility is a problem and that…only their own memory is…perfect.
Is there any better illustration of an unreliable narrator?
To believe in our own stories is to come to understand the essence of who we are, individually and collectively.
Lately I’ve been going back over essays I’ve written over the past twenty years. I’m grateful for this work; I have my ideas in hand, captured in the moment, showing the choices I made at the time, and how I felt, what I concerned myself with.
Memories, stories, details, and selection. We build our world as we hold on to our sense of self. I remember the shoelace in the peanut butter, even if my memory of that detail is only the collective memory of family storytelling.
Are you taking notes, as you live?
Wishing you all the best,
Monica
ps—If you’re working on writing, I’m here for manuscript review, either in pages or full manuscripts. Contact me, we can sort out pricing. I’d love to help you make your work shine.
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xo
I love the shoe string in the peanut butter. It's just a little too weird to be believable.
There's a workshop I'm a part where an instructor often cited Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and he quizzes us on heart authority (wife tossing sheepy).
What do you say to people in workshop, editorial, etc who "Don't buy" the strangeness of a short story, when we've already diluted the weirdness of a real life event to make it believeable?
I think about exaggerations in the Harvest.