A Talent That Is Remarkable
Exceptional writers have exceptional memories. Their talent to evoke in exact detail written images of the places, people, and events they recall is remarkable. Their writing is vivid and immensely readable. It conveys the sense of ”What I am telling you really happened” that you and all other memoirists would like their work to convey.
Most good writers find their richest material in their past. Writer after writer reports that. I believe it was John Updike who said he had all the material he would ever need by the age of twelve. No one knows why there is such a strong connection between breadth, depth, and accuracy of memory and writing skill.
Every memoirist, (as well as every writer of fiction and personal essays and every poet and playwright) should strive to make that attainable talent to evoke the past a part of their repertoire of skills. They can then call on that talent every day as they compose, and it will bring their writing vividly to life.
Exemplar: Aunt Sarah’s Living Room in 1948 as I Remember It
Aunt Sarah’s 1948 living room was wonderfully cluttered. On a gorgeous filigreed silver tray– catching your eye first–was a herd of delicate colored glass figurines of unicorns, deer, bears, tigers and leopards–red, pink, orange, green, and blue that stood in mute silence on glass shelves in a five-foot tall unbalanced glass case that rattled when anyone came too close–and a collection of miniature porcelain tea cups and saucers that seemed so delicate that a careless breath would dislodge them and send them crashing to smithereens at your feet. There were thick beige and red throw-pillows soft as balls of cotton scattered on the enormous plush sofa and on the neighboring recliner that through years of use had acquired the shape of Aunt Sarah’s body, and two large upholstered straight-back chairs. The faint path visible in the carpet leading in from the front hall was beginning to wear more noticeably this year.
There was a paisley ottoman and a footrest that you could trip over if you weren’t careful–or even if you were–and a glass coffee table that it was advisable to guard your shins from. In a corner lived a noisy parakeet that spent its every waking hour pecking at the door of its cage–to no avail.
There were not enough living room chairs to go around when the full family came over, but there were the dining room chairs to carry in and also for an overflow crowd there were gray metal fold-up chairs stenciled on the back in white “Property of Ebenezer Baptist Church.” Aunt Sarah stored them in the hall closet hidden behind her prized full-length fur coat, and was embarrassed for strangers to see them, for fear they believe the impossible, but conceivable–that she had pilfered the chairs from that house of God.
Lamps were everywhere. Aunt Sarah was a believer in bright lighting because in her words, “You have only one pair of eyes and they must be preserved.” There were gold floor lamps with shades still in their clear plastic wrappings, large, heavy, orange table lamps, and a miniature blue and white Little Bo Peep lamp on a tiny wooden platform that gathered dust on the wall over the upright piano, a piano around which a family sings together being a virtual necessity in a Welsh home.
A plastic fern decorated, as well as it could, the mahogany credenza next to the long, low radiator that from morning to night during the brutal Midwest winters and on chilly spring nights clanged, clanged again, and sputtered steam. The walls were papered in a design of vivid red and alluring pink roses with curved green stems.
On a kitchen wall, above the old serviceable stove, was fastened an Elgin clock that ran fast, forcing everyone to subtract twenty-two minutes a day if they wished for some reason to be accurate, and in the corner of the living room, close to the large drafty window fronting Austin Avenue, was an impressive century- old grandfather clock whose big bronze pendulum, to the entire family’s collective memory, had never moved.
© 2023 David J. Rogers
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The breathtaking Hawaiian Islands are an inappropriate place to become ill, but Honolulu, their state capital, largest city, and principal port, is where my younger sister Sharon had chosen to live–where the last months of her life she was hospitalized. In her early twenties she had left Chicago where we had grown up and I still live and she had visited one exquisite picture post card place after another in Spain, France, the South Pacific, and the Mediterranean, and so on, in search of the single place where she thought she would be happiest living and had found it.
On the nights of my visit after seeing her I would walk on the beaches, reflecting on the day, finding restful the fresh air and coolness, and sleeping at Sharon and Ron’s apartment. On the kitchen floor there was a scale to measure the dwindling of my sister’s existence, and sheets of paper on a clipboard suspended from a nail on the wall that recorded her declining weight: ninety-eight pounds, ninety, eighty-eight…and a calendar that had Xs on days she wasn’t healthy enough to work that in recent months had become all Xs. Against a wall there was a full-length gold-framed mirror that in the past she had looked into. The mirror was dusty.
There was no need for Kathy and me to discuss where Sharon stood. It needn’t be said that it wouldn’t be long and that soon Sharon would be gone entirely from my life and from the world. I knew that the moment coming from the airport and entering her hospital room and putting down my bag when I saw with a shock how puny Sharon looked now. The illness had given her an old woman’s body that had been ravaged by suffering there in that bed that was now her final home–so skinny–all bones–very sick–dying. The pain had turned her black hair white and it was short from the treatment and no longer long. Her once-pretty face was gaunt, her cheeks gray, her body very tired. Her long pianist’s fingers were so thin that her ring had slipped off and was lost. But there in her gray, lonely, fading beauty there was still about her that same gentleness you could ruffle with your breath, the same spirit in her fierce eyes, the same poise, and the same elegance. Looking into my eyes, imagining what I was seeing, Sharon had clutched her gown across her chest in embarrassment –covering herself in shame–still a modest woman–and said, breaking my heart, sucking the breath out of my lungs, “I’m a mess aren’t I?,” and I had replied to her, “Shar, you are beautiful.”
the happy girl and boy that we had once been, getting ready to ride our bikes to the library. The gray interior lights were dimmed low, as if the plane itself were drowsy. Everything was silent but for the deep hum of the engines, the other passengers asleep. I wanted to prepare myself for what it would be like now without a sister, my parents without a daughter, my children without an aunt.
Writing vivid descriptions is a skill writers should strive to refine. Yet it is a weakness of many writers. If your ability to write effective descriptions is lacking it should be worked on vigorously and 
picked up. Into the air fluttered two hundred gulls with noisy wings. Above us clouds raced each other headlong across the coal black sky. Onto the shore crashed a procession of liquid walls–white-crested, angled slightly off to the south where blocks of limestone twenty feet high lay as if dropped from the heavens by gods. The magnificent waves rose–hills of water that seemed to pause, suspended for a moment at their peak as though they could rise no higher, and then crumbled and broke on the shore like a multitude of shattered stars. The spume spread and undertows slid back like shears below the breakers. Wave upon wave upon wave upon wave rose, lunged, and plunged like a field of gray-green wheat bowing under the wind. Just a moment before there had been not a breeze, not a breath of wind. But now all the wind in the world seemed to be concentrated on that strip of earth. It was a lion of a wind unleashed, untamed, cool, cold, with a sparkle, bite, and sting–many winds in fact, one gust coming, ending, another coming, another waiting–bringing pouring in to us the odors of water, of fish, and of the wind itself. The hoarse roar of the foaming waves filled all the air with the sounds of artillery. Trees on the shore bent as though made of rubber and our drenched bodies glistened.
“Young couples sitting on benches held each other, kissed, and heard the melancholy saxophone through the open windows of the gymnasium. Past a grove of gray trees, out on the lagoon, among mallards drifting on the water like leaves and bull frogs hidden in the shadows like thieves, students in row boats whose oars dangled free and made little splashing sounds, lay back, their bodies warm and glowing under light blankets. Contented, they were looked down upon by a pageantry of stars that seemed so close together that a finger wouldn’t fit between them. And while laughter floated like smoke through the night, they spoke of the incredible deeds they would one day perform.”
There was a tenderness and manly sweetness in my father’s manner, and too, the restraint of a gentlemanly politeness and natural shyness about speaking of things that moved him most profoundly, and which I knew indisputably he felt toward me, as I did toward him.
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