Lamenting the Normal Life

A friend told me I should write a memoir of my life because growing up in various parts of the country could be interesting. Since I grew up in the 50s and 60s, he said it would make a great nostalgia piece. Possibly so. I did have some fun times. But what I really wanted to write was the Great American Novel - the tragic story of the rise and fall of...whom? My problem, I lamented many times as an English literature major yearning to write the Big One, was that I had lived a perfectly normal life. No big tragedies, no cruel parents one of whom was a sad, but creative and sometimes lovable drunk. No brother who ran away from home at 14 to hitchhike across the country and turn out to be a famous comedian in Vegas. My minimally dysfunctional family provided no fodder for humorous satire or sad commentary. What can you do with a middle-class American family that gets along reasonably well, whose parents never divorced or separated, whose pets were even the average dog and cat or two? Not much,it turns out.

Yes, I know memoirs are not always totally factual and I certainly can understand why. If you lived an average life, you would need to embellish a lot to make it interesting. If you lived a unique life because of horrendous family relations, you might need to change some names and tone some things down if any family members are still alive. If you experienced an interesting, unique life, memory may not serve you well. So, fact becomes laced with fiction. It's the way of the genre and most readers expect a little fluff with their facts. But I wanted the real thing to write about and I didn't have it. Therefore, the memoir remains a two page sketch, hidden in a file I probably cannot find. But that's ok. Now I am glad I had a good family. So I wrote a poem instead.

Shall I Pour?

Sometimes I wish I’d had
literarily or artistically talented parents
who made great art from
daily pain
and who had
passed down to me their talent
or interest or knowledge or
just the opportunity to be
among art as a child.

Wouldn’t it be
so much easier for me to be a
teller of tales if one of
them had told them before me?
Wouldn’t I then have
naturally picked up this skill through daughterly osmosis?

Wouldn’t it be easier if I’d
been steeped in the tea
Of parental talent as a child and
brewed slowly over the years
to pour the words now
In a golden arc of honey-sweetened images
for others to drink and exclaim, “Yes, that’s it.
How true. I wish I’d said that.”?

But, my childish
excuses do not put herbs in the pot;
I must arduously brew my own words into ideas and images
to fill mugs
with warmth and wit and wonder.

I alone am the
tea maker
pot pourer
leaf reader
who must steep myself in life
If I am to pour at all.

Literary parents would have been nice and very, very helpful,
but they just weren’t my cup of tea.