A Radom Thought Day (Like all days)

So I have been having very random thoughts lately.....thoughts like, even though it stands to reason that it would be.....a pair of jeans is VERY HOT RIGHT FROM THE DRYER....! No, really, can someone please tell me they too have pulled on a pair of jeans right from the dryer--mid-cycle even--and been burned by the button against their stomach?! People, I teach infants and toddlers and have done so for 15 years, nearly. It seems a bit embarrassing, but I actually burned myself during a real and very compelling search to get warm this afternoon in just this way. Seriously..... that's the kind of day this has been...!!!!!

Another thing. I have been thinking obsessively about my life if it were a novel. Right now, in fact.

I really love to read autobiographies and biographies. Right now I am reading the autobiography of Gene Wilder. I already read Gilda Radner several years ago, and since they were married (him, wife #3 and her husband #2) I figured it was fair to get his side of their marriage too. They were both very funny people (OH wait, only Gilda is dead. Sorry Gene, you are still funny) and I am enjoying the book very much. A light read is always a helpful way to distract oneself from a belly-button burn after all. All this brings me back to autobiographies and my question to you...

Do you think you would intentionally be more whitty, or seek more clever or interesting friends if you thought of your life as a novel right now? Would you say things at the grocery store that was impressive--or intentionally fill your cart with foods that made you seem sensitive, or daring, or unpredictable? I thought of this when Gene described meeting a friend for lunch, then stopping off at the store on his way home. He said he bought marmalade, socks, cheese and lotion. See? Even his shopping is funny (how many of you are thinking...what can be done with cheese, lotion and jelly involving socks?).

My life is decidedly uninteresting from the perspective of a novel, even though many of you have told me it has played out like one. Sure, all listed out over the last 34 years there have been some whoppers of great and unexpected turns...but my between shopping, shopping (the shopping you do when its not your regular shopping day, disappointed you didn't make it through the week yet again without running out of something) is so mundane: milk, bagels, orange juice, diapers, raisin bran, paper plates, ketchup, bananas. When I am alone I don't shop at the grocery store. I buy diet coke from the drive-through or chocolate covered raisins at Marshalls and satisfy myself with popcorn or cereal then just chew gum and pop caffeine pills until people are back in the house I need to feed with real food. Adrienne needed to shop before she left for her field-trip last night. She bought: Asprin, skittles, goldfish crackers, underwear, gum and iced tea. I told her she was a future sorority girl, except there are no sororities at BYU. She giggled and we both took a piece of the gum.

Gene Wilder keeps quoting lines from his plays and movies. Great great lines. One was, "It's only with the heart that one can see clearly; what's essential is invisible to the eye." It's from the film The Little Prince. I thought of the cleverness of him to add that line to his autobiography even though he didn't write it. It made him seem so much more emotionally evolved and profound. I tried my hand a few hours later to do the same thing in an email to my ex-brother-in-law (my exlaw as I call them fondly). He said, "I am old." I quoted Yoda and then likened him to a tree. You'd have to ask him, but I don't think it had the same effect as Wilder achieved. I will keep trying....

I think that if today were a chapter in my novel, I'd use a bit of creative licence--and that's the thing--if I was writing a book about me, I wouldn't call it an autobiography. I would want to embellish it here and there--bedazzle it a little. I would never want to be an Oprah's book Club book, because she would want to know what was bedazzled and what wasn't and I wouldn't want anyone to be disappointed about me. I know the audience would hope the real real bad stuff was real--just like I hope the real boring things were somehow more profound.

When I was a child, I secretly wished my life were just more touching than it is---that in some way, I could be a train wreck and everyone would take a few moments gawking at the ugliness of my troubles in the same way we can stretch our necks to see if we see any blood on the highway when we pass an ambulance attending an accident. I wanted to be gawked at, which is so strange to me now. My childhood was outwardly mundane and middle-class, but very much a train wreck. It took me several decades to get to the place to see that....and even then I was the one with my head turned to see if I left any blood on the highway in my youth. Processing my childhood has been an interesting ride, but not novel, I wouldn't say.

And finally, I have one more thing to say.....

BE CAREFUL THE MEMORIES YOU MAKE.

Without revealing too much of my personal life, I can say that I have had some very interesting encounters with people over the years. Recently I have corresponded with someone who has clearly a better memory of our friendship than I had. I have been rolling in laughter hearing some of the things I KNOW I must have done, but have completely forgotten. Things just wiped away from my memory but sound so completely like things I would do! It occurred to me that he remembered more than I did, because I was someone particular to him. Who I was to him made the memory stronger--even though we both were there, and both experiencing the same things. Embracing the embarrassment of forgetting a significant piece of my 18th year of age (or perhaps I was 17?) I decided to make my amnesia a teaching tool. I sagely told Ren (without giving any context), "When you are in the company of others--anyone really--you never know what memories you are making for them. Something might seem so ordinary, or casual, or plain but because of who you are, or who you might become that memory could be more to them than you can imagine while you are making it." A sage Mama confuses her young.

The example for me is when I am hurt by someone. Suddenly all their words are so burned into my memory, and later I can say, "Do you remember telling me that you thought I was......" the other person might say, "No, no I don't" but I am so sure. I can remember what they were wearing and what I had for dinner the hour before they told me. Inevitably I want to say, "How can you not remember??!!!" But it's precisely the same thing as this string of memories I had to be really JOGGED to recall from this high school friend. A memory, even when we are part of it, is nothing we own. Like a script we all read from, the experiences of our lives require a whole body of actors--and its miserableness is held by as many voices as persons we encounter. You might have made a memory for someone today, even if tomorrow you forgot what you did. That's legacy. And, that's what we tell in our autobiographies. If you are reading this, you would be in my autobiography.....so be careful what you do out there people---it just might become part of my text one day!

Hugs!