Trial By Fire

Last week one of my students came to class with the horrifying news that the previous evening she had arrived home to find fire trucks in the parking lot, trying to control a fire in the apartment directly above hers. She came to class because, she said, “I need something to do to keep my mind off the horror! I had to be here!”

Fortunately the fire was contained before it destroyed her unit. A week later her apartment and belongings are being treated for smoke damage. She still has not been able to spend more than a few minutes at a time in the apartment and has been unable to determine whether her computer works or not. Fortunately the story she had written for class last week was stored on her work computer. We all have our fingers crossed that the contents of her home hard drive will be intact.

You never know when a fire will start. You never know when a thief will come. You never know when a hard drive will die.

Are your files backed up? Are your really important files backed up outside your home?

For several years I’ve lamented that basic safe deposit boxes were not wide enough to store backup CDs. That is no longer a concern. You could fit enough USB drives in a small box to store a few terrabytes of data. SD cards (like you use in cameras) are thumbnail size and can hold up to several gigabytes. They can store any kind of file, not just camera-generated photos. Stick them in a card reader, and they are like an old-fashioned floppy on mega-steroids. The price is dropping fast. You can buy an external compact hard drive with around 200 gigabytes of storage for under $100. These drives are the size of a stack of about 30 index cards. You could fit one in a small safe deposit box with plenty of room left for wills, financial records and a small coin collection.

But you don’t have to go to the bank unless the security of a bank vault matters to you. The systems administrator of our public library uses two external hard drives to back up the whole library system. She takes a drive with a fresh back-up image home with her each night and brings the alternate one in the following morning for updating. In the worst case scenario, only one day’s work would be lost. You could use this approach with a friend or neighbor, probably less frequently.

I know too many people who have gone through the heartbreak of losing the stories of their lives to hard drive crashes. Please, please, don’t let your name be added to this list! Back up your stories! Do it NOW!

Write now: about an unforeseen disaster in your life (may be computer-related, or not). Were you ready? What happened. Why? How did you cope? What would you do next time?

Keeping Travel Memories Fresh

Travel, especially foreign travel, is a great way to broaden your horizons and enrich your life. I’ve been especially fortunate to have the opportunity over the last twenty years to visit every continent except Australia, and have all sorts of great stories to tell of my experiences.

One of the best way’s I’ve found to keep these memories from fading is to write about them, but when I am constantly barraged by one spectacular sight after another, ongoing connections with fascinating people, and an endless stream of unfamiliar surroundings, it all blurs together, even before I get home.

I’ve often begun a trip with a fresh notebook in hand, intending to journal events on a daily basis. Once I managed to do this for five whole days. I can use precious time to immerse myself in the adventure, sleep, or journal. The bottom priority never gets done!

Our recent trip to China went much better in this respect, because I used multiple streams of input to record experiences rather than relying on a single mode:

Daily event sheets — Unlike previous trips which we’ve mostly done on our own, we made arrangements to go to China with Vantage Tours, and happily give them five stars for performance. One of the many reasons for this rating was the daily event sheets our guide provided. Each one detailed times and destinations, with brief notes about what we’d be seeing and doing. What a valuable memory jogger!

Mini-notebook — As an after-thought, I stuck a tiny spiral-bound notebook in my bag. It fit in my small hip pouch. Our guides often used bus time en route to daily destinations for short lectures on local customs, history, and such things. It was so easy to whip out my little notebook and capture the content.

Voice recorder — I stripped most of the music content and took along a Zen Plus V mp3 player for making quick voice notes about amazing things I saw, impressions, smells, sounds, and other things that wouldn’t come through in a photo. The Zen conveniently hangs around my neck, so it was easy to keep track of. It’s not a good choice for audio you want to share, and it’s not as easy to use as a dedicated recorder, but it’s better than nothing. Many cell phones, cameras, and other mp3 players also include this function.

Photos — Between the two of us, we have nearly 10,000 photos. Many of mine were quick shots made for memory joggers, not sharing. It’s easy to get carried away with digital, especially if you carry along a laptop! We made lots of separate folders for downloads, to keep track of the location for each batch, and I synchronized the clocks on our cameras so we can pool resources and sort by time. A few of these photos will find their way onto a website and into a slideshow for sharing at libraries and similar locations.

E-mail — I don’t recommend spending lots of vacation time writing e-mail, but I kept a document for recording thoughts that I could quickly paste into e-mails later, and added to it while photos downloaded.

Standard journal — I even wrote a few pages in the larger spiral I took as an official trip journal.

What will I do with this wealth of information? I may take time to compile a complete document with the story of our trip, or I may not get around to it. That doesn’t matter. Recording the details helps cement trip memories in my mind, and will serve as reference material if questions come up later. I took the notes primarily for myself, and if others benefit, so much the better.

Write now: about a fantastic vacation you took. It may be recent or far in the past. It may involve overseas travel, or a trip to the park across town. Include descriptions of the scenery, impressions of the people you saw, the place you stayed, any smells you remember (food, flower fragrances, etc.), weather, comforts, discomforts, memorable events, travel challenges, and anything else you remember. Include photos if you have them.

Where Do You Start?

“Where do you start?” “How do you start?”

These may be the two most common questions people ask, specifically about writing their life story, but the questions apply to any type of writing project.

You start by writing, and you start anywhere. Start with the first thought that comes to mind. Write about that and keep writing. If you can’t think of anything else to write about, write about not knowing where to start, and keep writing. Words will begin to flow, and a story will slowly take shape. One word, one thought, will lead to another.

I can’t credit a specific source for those words, they are universal, but Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg come to mind. Anne mentions this concept continually in her classic, Bird by Bird, and Natalie hits on it regularly as she develops the concept of Writing Practice in her best-selling series of books about writing: Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, and Old Friend from Far Away.

Last week I found this concept of just starting — anywhere at all — useful for cleaning the garage, a project I could easily put off for a decade, a situation quite similar to writer's block. Faced with an overwhelming task, I started quite simply, by consolidating flattened boxes previously set aside for recycling and adding more to the pile. That led to sweeping a tiny patch. Then I had room to rearrange the shelves behind the pile ... and so it went. Even without a project plan, each step led to another. I’m not done, but the the project has shape now, and momentum is building. I'm actually getting excited about it and look forward to going out there to work again.

The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing began the same way, but it didn’t begin as a book. It began with a single flier describing the first life story writing workshop I ever taught. I had no idea where to start when I wrote that flier. It grew from there, through many phases that included stacks and piles of handouts with overlapping material, and more stacks and piles of stories and essays.

That finished book barely scratches the surface of my reservoir. Several other projects are taking shape that will tap more of its contents. Since I don’t work on each project regularly, they get cold and I lose my sense of direction. When I go back to one, I must start fresh, but not from scratch. Each time I’m a little bewildered about where to start, but it’s getting easier. Soon I'll make a commitment to a single one and finish it.

No, it doesn’t matter where you start. Just get those fingers moving, over paper or the keyboard. Let the words flow. Stories, even finished projects, will happen.

Write now: about a time when you had trouble getting a project started and how you handled this. You might write about a writing project or another one. Every project is the same. It has to be started, and it’s not always easy to know how.

Chinese Clothes Dryers

Most apartment buildings in China have balconies, and a large percentage of the balconies we saw were decorated with drying laundry. I was fascinated at the diversity and universality of these displays, and followed the urge to snap many photos, a few of which are included in the slideshow above.

As I stared at building after building decorated with drying dainties, I wondered how long it will be before America adopts something similar. How long will it be before snooty neighborhoods that don’t allow yards to be marred with such plebian amenities as clotheslines change their thinking? How long will it be before clothespin sales hit record levels, as bicycles sales are already doing?

I was reminded of our visit to Ireland a couple of years ago. All the B&Bs we stayed in featured clotheslines in the yard, and most were in use. One hostess explained Ireland’s rate system for electricity. Initial costs remain low, to enable families to heat their homes, cook their food, and light a few bulbs without undue strain on their budgets. Above that minimum, rates go up a graduated scale, similar to our income tax structure. The incentive to “dry green” is strong!

Back in the fifties, I grew up with clotheslines, and spent my share of time attaching clothes to them and removing them again. I remember hanging lingerie on center lines between larger items so they wouldn’t be visible to the neighbors. My first experience with automatic dryers was in a college dorm, and later in the laundromat during our Boston apartment days. I loved the convenience of dryers, but I never considered that I’d have one of my own. I agonized for months over what the neighbors would think of my dingy sheets when I hung them on the line in our new home when Hubby finished grad school. I studied television commercials to learn of new products for getting them sparkling white.

Imagine my surprise when the new house we moved into in Richland, Washington did not have a clothesline. Instead, it had a laundry closet in the hall with space for both washer and dryer. Within less than a week, that space was occupied by a matched coppertone Kenmore washer and dryer set, perfect for the dozens of diapers I had to wash each week. My worries about dingy sheets were over, primarily because the new washer got them cleaner than the laundromat machine. But even if they’d stayed dingy, nobody would have seen.

Except for rare occasions on camping trips, I have not used a clothesline for ... never mind how long. But in this “thinking green” era, I’m becoming nostalgic. Those ubiquitous clothes hanging from balconies in China fed my desire for the fragrance of sun-dried sheets towels. My yearning rose even higher when I read Pat Flathouse’s Thankful Thursday blog where she mentioned that hanging sheets to dry is one of her favorite things to do. I’m cogitating the best place in our steeply sloping, seriously shady yard to install this post-modern appliance.

Write now: about your experience with laundry and clotheslines. Did you ever hang clothes out to dry on a cold winter day? Did you dash out to gather them from the line just as it began to rain? Did you hang them on the porch or in the basement when it was raining? When did you first use a dryer? If you have always been fortunate enough to avoid laundry duty at home, what about college or camping trips?

Apology to China

Shanghai skyline from bus crossing bridge

Shanghai riverside park

My face is red. I misspoke and must set the record straight. As you can see from the two photos above, the skies are not always white in China as reported in my last post. Flipping through some of the thousands of photos I took on our trip, specifically to find pictures of some of the stunningly beautiful high-rise architecture we saw (my title for the trip is China: Under Construction), I was shocked to see several consecutive pictures taken in Shanghai that featured blue sky. At first I thought that was caused slightly tinted bus windows, as in the first shot, but the second one was shot in the open air around noon.

How could that happen? How could I fail to remember the mild sunburn I got that day as we walked through a park and along the streets of a part of town that has been preserved as a living, fully functional museum of a historic Shanghai shopping district?

I share this story with you for three primary reasons. First, to set the record straight about China’s air and weather. But more than that, this incident reflects the way memory works. I began the trip noticing the white skies, and I can truly say this sunny day was an anomaly. To my mind, this beautiful sunny day was comfortably “normal,” like I’d expect at home, so to my programmed perception for the trip, it was hardly worth noticing. It did not stick in memory.

Ordinarily, the unusual does stick in memory, but for the purposes of this trip, my perceptions got turned around. The white skies that would be unusual at home became the norm for China, and that norm, being unusual in my overall life experience, is what stuck — not the single gorgeous day that lulled me into a sense of familiar comfort and knocked the sky out of awareness. (I hope you follow that!)

The third point is the value of having multiple modes of capturing your experience. If I hadn’t had those photos, I never would have remembered the sunny day. And ... if I hadn’t been focusing on white skies, I never would have noticed that one day was different. More about this in another post.

Our minds and memories are amazing things, as are the functions that focus what’s in them. I don’t want to turn this blog into a dissertation on brain function, fascinating as the topic is. If you want to learn more, specifically about the reticular activating system that continually scans our input for relevant information and helped me notice that blue sky when I saw it this morning, I recommend two books. The first is Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain , by Sharon Begley. The second is Liberating Greatness, by Hal Williamson and Sharon Eakes.

Was I untruthful in my earlier report of white skies? No. That is my primary memory, and although it’s not entirely accurate, it was my “personal truth” when I wrote it. It’s also generally true. In this case, writing about a country I’ve come to care about is not so different from writing about a person I care about, and I felt obligated to set the record straight. I can do this in a blog. It’s not so easy in print. I would not lose sleep if I’d immortalized that impression, but this is a good reminder to me and others to double-check what we can, if there is a way to do so, without becoming obsessive about details we can’t check.

Write now: about a time when you discovered a memory error, or remembered things differently from a family member or friend. Or maybe nobody called you on the error, but you found it yourself. How did you handle this? How do you feel about literal accuracy in your writing? Are you fact focused or impressionistic?

White Skies

Any three-year-old child will tell you, the sky is blue. That’s one of the fundamental truths in life. Even on a cloudy day, you know that blue sky lies above the clouds, soon to return. Blue sky, green grass, white snow, clear air. These are constants you can count on. Unless you live in China. Maybe other places in Asia too, but China is the one I know about. In China the sky is white. So is the air. Not white like snow, but white like pearl dust.

I’d heard about the air quality problems in China, and I expected to find nasty brown air when I stepped off the plane in Beijing last month. Imagine my surprise at finding pearly, milky mist, not the sinister, visibly toxic smog I had anticipated. Perhaps this is just an anomaly, I thought. Perhaps tomorrow the mist will clear. But it didn’t. It varied in brightness and luminosity, and we had occasional rain, but it never cleared. The same conditions prevailed in Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqin, and Guilin. They remained constant out in the country as we cruised along the Yangtze River through the three gorges from Wushan to Chongqin. Finally, in Hong Kong we saw patches of pale blue between the clouds.

To my vast relief, the visible air presented little challenge to breathing. I found it a source of continual fascination, more novel than being surrounded by cities too vast to fathom, an endless sea of Asian faces, and incomprehensible language and signs. The mist magnified the sun’s strength, diffusing it to generalized glare that taxed the limits of my camera and hurt my eyes.

Shanghai Skyline through hotel room window

The air absorbed the cities. In Shanghai our hotel room was on the 35th floor of a tower high above the city. Clusters of skyscrapers filled the landscape as far as I could see around an arc of about 120º. I have no idea how far this cityscape extends — the edges melted into the mist.

In contrast to the sky and air, the grass and trees were reliably, intensely green — the same green I know and love at home. The earth was brown, and water variable. These constants reassured me that I had not left Planet Earth.

I loved every minute of the twenty days we spent in China, seeing the sights, wandering random city streets, taking copious notes and thousands of pictures. I loved the openness of the people, who always returned a smile and nod, and often asked us, in halting English or simple gestures, to pose for pictures with them. Those who were able to ask were endlessly curious about our opinion of China. They are intensely proud of the progress their country is making, and Olympic Fever raged like the Spanish Flu. It matters immensely to ordinary people that Americans think highly of China.

In the end, it’s the white sky and air hovering above and around that sea of welcoming faces that I remember. China, the land of the white sky. It would be hard to get used to, and much as I loved my stay in China, it’s good to be home where the sky is blue, as it is supposed to be, even on a gray rainy day like today.

Write now: about a time when you were in a situation where some fundamental element of life was changed. Perhaps you visited the desert and missed the greenness of your part of the country. Perhaps you live in the desert and felt claustrophobic amid endless trees. Seashore, mountains, cities, country. Differences are good and help us appreciate our home surroundings. How do you react and handle these differences?