No one smiles in these old portraits. They look stiff, like they’re already dead. Maybe it’s the knowledge only portrait models have that makes them look like that, deciding how you’ll look forever. They look trapped in their own time. Portrait models, I feel you.

Me I’m smiling because I don’t know any better. I always looked younger than my age and tried to appear more legitimate, older. But the camera can’t be fooled. Here I’m wearing one of the first pieces of Starbucks logo wear I got back in 1995. My girlfriend and I are car camping but I’ve brought my new manual typewriter along because well, I’m a writer and might be inspired to write. I can’t believe I had the gall to make that much noise while other campers were bedding down for the night. What could possibly be so important it needed to be typed? And who dates someone like that?

The sound I made with that manual typewriter is like the smell that comes off teenaged boys when they first discover men’s cologne, a way of forcing myself on others with a conviction only I cared about. How many unseen headaches I created, how many winces and frowns? How many house mates endured that bad percussion? How much did I besmirch the rep of all writers with the noise I made on that mint-green machine?

As if the typewriter wasn’t enough, I carried a pocket notepad and pen everywhere too. I know, because I saved all the used-up notepads and methodically dated them, 25 years’ worth. Writing every piece of nonsense was a way of substantiating myself, ergo my life, of making myself more legitimate through the frame of my pocket-sized worldview. The notepad was a lying mirror of sorts, one that concurred with anything I said. But it served a purpose, too. I think fledgling artists need some degree of disillusionment otherwise they may never get off the ground. Some need more than others. Some get lost in the disillusionment and never get onto the art part.

And maybe that was the best way of summing up how I felt when I looked at those shoe boxes stuffed with old journals and notepads. It was an ugly mash-up of feelings: I couldn’t go through them, couldn’t let go of them. Sometimes I wondered if my kids would have the gumption to reconcile it after I’m gone—and rescue me from the labyrinth of my own shortcomings. But that felt like one of the worst things you could do to a loved one. So instead I did nothing, which was easier, and pretended I wouldn’t die, which got harder. You can’t expect someone to save you from your own labyrinth: you made the walls, you made the Minotaur. Work your way out of it, or shut TF up.

In fact there’s a lot I saved from the pre-digital era hoping I could use it as source material for a book. Bit by bit I’ve been getting rid of that stuff. Like old phone directories from the mid-90s when I worked in the Starbucks corporate office. I knew many of those people, so having their names helped me remember them, funny quirks and so on. All the characters I needed were right there, if only I had the nerve to write about them (and knew how to avoid legal trouble).

But at the same time I didn’t want to rely on those old papers to make something new. It felt old to the touch, like going through the personal effects of someone who’d just died. Or long-ago died.

So instead I looked for ways I could dredge up the past in my daily living. Like remembering what it was like to work in a Starbucks store as I sat in a Starbucks store. (It actually doesn’t require much imagination, they haven’t changed much.)

The more I read about memoir, the more I think the memoirist has to make their memories feel alive. And to do that you have to free your memories from their own time. It’s like giving voice to those old portrait models, help them out of the frame.

If I’m to write the story of my life I want to be smiling in it, not trapped in a corner. There were times I could remember so vividly I wanted to pin them down while I still could. Now would be a good time.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, identity, journal writing