Words of Redemption

Every man’s memory is his private literature. - Aldous Huxley

This is part two of a series on memory and storytelling. For part 1, click here.

I was born in Medford, Oregon in 1978. When I was two months old, my parents moved to Bellevue, Washington, a small town minutes east of Seattle. In the spring of 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted. In the fall, my sister was born in a Bellevue hospital¹.

In 1983², we left behind the Pacific Northwest and moved to San Antonio, Texas.

When we moved from Washington to Texas, I was too young to have a rich catalogue of memories about our home, the near-constant rain, or the rich beauty of the place we lived. In fact, I only have one concrete memory of the time we lived there. It was my fourth birthday, and I was crossing the street in our neighborhood and singing. The song? A Brandon Satrom original entitled “I’m four!” Lyrics are:

I’m four!

{Pause}

I’m four!

{Repeat}

Even then, I think it was obvious to all that I was destined for great things.

Thankfully, my time in Seattle didn’t end when we moved to Texas. A few years later, my sister and I started spending a week each summer in Seattle with my Father and my Grandparents.

It is from those visits that most of my memories have been drawn.

Seattle has always been a mystical place to me. One that I remember with more fondness than almost any place on earth, and one that I never seem to visit enough.

It should be no surprise, then, that much of my first novel is set in Seattle.

When I wrote the first draft last November, I weaved my memories of people and places into the story almost without realizing how much “remembered” detail I was inserting.

These were places I hadn’t seen in years. I thought they were long forgotten.

And yet, writing about them was remembering them, and my memories started to land on the page fully formed and vivid.

I remembered Pike Place market: The smell of fish, flowers and fresh bread; the crowds packed into narrow hallways; endless browsing through stalls selling every imaginable collectable, good or trinket; the creaky wooden floorboards that line the maze of shops below the market; the wonderful smell of incense in every nook and cranny, in every store and market; the magic shop with its giant posters of Carter the Great outside and its promise of magical apprenticeship within.

I remembered the Seattle Ferry: The size of the boats and the seemingly limitless number of people they could hold; the calm of the Puget Sound, and the beauty of Mt. Rainier on a clear day, perhaps more often in my memory than in reality; the smell of the water and the gentle rocking of the giant ferry as it slowly moved across the Sound.

I remembered the forest near my Grandparents house and the grove of trees in their backyard. I remember the pure smell of pine and the feeling of a cool breeze from the Sound. I remember picking blackberries for my Grandmother. I was with my sister, and we would always eat our fill before returning home.

Perhaps it was the mystery of the place combined with the frequency of my visits.

Perhaps my memory was mostly the fanciful fiction of a child experiencing things that do not exist in his world.

Perhaps it was a helping of both.

Before Sarah and I traveled to Seattle last month, I wondered how the reality of this place would measure up to my memories and the ways I had transferred them to the page.

I worried that I’d be crushed by the reality of a place not like the Narnia in my head.

I worried that my novel would suddenly shift from Literary Fiction to Fantasy with the cold blast of fact that covers the warmth and fire of fiction.

The truth, of course, is that my memory of the place wasn’t perfect. I remembered things that weren’t true, and I had forgotten things worth remembering.

But overall, I was amazed with how much I hadn’t forgotten. About How much I had gotten right when I wrote about this place.

Even after years and countless other memories held firmly and countless long forgotten, this place lives in my mind.

And after our visit, the mystery remains.

The memories are sharper, and new ones have been added, but the mystery will always weave itself into the fabric of the sounds, smells and sights of this place.

And when I write about it again–when I work on my novel or write about it in my stories–the mystery and the memory will weave itself onto the page.

And hopefully, upon reading, that mystery and those memories will capture the reader and catapult him there.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction. - Carol Shields

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1. These two things are in no way related [↩]
2. Or thereabouts, I’m not 100% on the date [↩]

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