Mythic Places

I recently reconnected with a high school friend on Facebook. She told me that a few years ago, she and her husband had moved to Benton, Kentucky.


So you're thinking, that is just too (yawn) interesting. Please tell me more.  


Or not. 


But here's the thing.


She might as well have told me she had moved to Never Never Land. Or Camelot. Or Flatland. Or Tatooine. Or Oz. 


In my mind, Benton, Kentucky isn't the sort of place that a real person can move to. It doesn't exist in the same universe as say, Chicago, London, and Yellowstone National Park.


When I was growing up, my dad usually took his vacation to paint the house or work on cars. Boring, responsible stuff. But two or three times we took a mythic journey in the green Oldsmobile to visit my brother's family in Benton.

Happy memories. Eating watermelon with my nephews and niece down in the creekbed, so we wouldn't get hopelessly messy. (We did anyway.) Visiting a crazy, colorful, and wonderful assortment of aunts and uncles. Splashing in a washtub outdoors.  Picking blackberries. Eating catfish at the Pelican in the Land Between the Lakes. Riding a horse. Lazy summer days and sparkling nights with singing crickets and shooting stars. Shopping in Padukah. Aunt Wid's best-ever bean soup and Aunt Luna’s pies with golden curls of meringue. (Even the names are crazy and colorful.)

And through the years there would be other Benton memories, not all happy. Funerals for many loved ones who died. The day my boyfriend found my college class ring in Kentucky Lake after it had slipped off my finger. Making my wedding dress on the sewing machine from hell, while I stayed with my dad in Benton for a few months. A baby shower my sister-in-law gave for me, where people I didn't even know knit booties and brought gifts. And for funerals, they came with pies and cakes and sandwiches. A neighborly place, Benton.

Dad with Cousin William's tractor, in Benton

Benton memories are few and far between, but they are all special, all infused with an other-worldliness, with great sorrow or great joy. Whenever I went to Benton, I left this world behind. 


I suspect that we all have mythic places in our lives. Places that loom large in our imaginations. Places we can never quite explain to "outsiders." Sometimes we long to return, as Adam must have longed to return to Eden, but the entrance is barred. The house has been sold. The people have died. The landscape has forever changed. 

Most places we've visited, most places we've lived, are stored in our minds, but mythic places are stored in our hearts. We can visit them only in dreams and memories. And yet, no bulldozer or tornado--not even the slow but certain ravages of entropy--can destroy them. 


In mythic places, the dead still walk and talk in all their endearing quirkiness. What we felt is more important than the facts. What we remember matters more than what really happened.

At Dad's house in Benton,
my brother and sis-in-law with my first baby

And though we can never really return to a mythic place, maybe we don't need to. We carry it with us always--it becomes a part of who we are. And likewise, we become a part of the place, a part of the story.


As King Arthur sings to a boy at the final curtain of Lerner and Lowe's Camelot:



     Don't let it be forgot
     That once there was a spot
     For one brief shining moment
     that was known as Camelot.


We remember, and we share the stories. That is how mythic places live on.

Your Life Is a Treasure

To read Part I of this series, "Your Life Is a Story," Click here!

It smelled like old books, furniture polish, and just a hint of motor oil. 

When I was a child, I loved to go exploring in my father’s mahogany secretary desk — the kind with a fold-down tray supported by two sliders, and lots of little cubbyholes and drawers that collectively held The Most Fascinating Stuff in the Universe.

Leather key holders from Columbia Oldsmobile, where he worked as a mechanic. Church bulletins from Norwood Baptist on Courtland Avenue. Electric bills. Rubber bands. Receipts for car parts and house paint. Ball point pens and mechanical pencils. Photographs. Letters written with fountain pens in feathery script. Old report cards. Tools and gizmos that did who-knows-what. All mysterious and intriguing. You would have thought I was Howard Carter, breaking the seal on King Tut’s Tomb and taking that first jaw-dropping look inside.

Why? Maybe because these artifacts belonged to the strange world of grown-ups.  Or because they were Daddy’s things. Or just because they were um, sort of, technically-- that is to say--off limits. This desk exploring could only happen, you understand, on those rare occasions when I was home alone--but you are hereby sworn to secrecy!

Our memories are like that old desk. We keep poking pieces of our experience into cubbyholes, and who knows when or if we’ll find them again. The Pythagorean Theorem? Can't quite remember it, but the cute math teacher who first taught it to you? Him you remember. Seems like you can never find what you’re looking for, but whenever you look, you’ll probably find something interesting.

And not only interesting, but precious, like buried treasure. Our memories hold clues to our essence, our identity, our purpose, our destiny. A burglar rummaging through my father's old desk would have been deeply disappointed, but as I look through it now in memory, I summon up my dad and my childhood.

Last week, I gave an assignment—to list five memories for each decade of your life and to gather a few photos from different times in your life. Here's one of my photos. It's me on a really big bunny. (I'm the one with the balloon.)  :-)

Your list represents (on a very small scale) your life. You could list many more memories in each column. But this is enough for a start.

Once you have your list of memories, now you can make choices. You can choose which ones you want to write down, which ones to pass on, which ones to keep private, which ones to carry to your grave! (Of course, those are the ones inquiring minds want to know.)

Choose two items from your memory list and one of the photos to write about. Maybe just a few sentences, maybe a whole page.

You don't have to be a fancy-pants writer!

There’s something amazing about writing down your memories. One memory triggers another and another. Here are some things to keep in mind as you write. 

• You don’t have to be a fancy-pants writer to do this. If you can write cursive, or print, or use a computer, you can do this. Or you can tell your stories to someone else to write down for you.
• You can be totally honest because you don’t ever have to show your story to anybody unless you want to.
• You don’t have to write with perfect grammar, spelling, or sentence structure. Just get it down. You can edit it later. 

• Don't feel bad about not starting this sooner. With age, we gain perspective and understanding. Think how much more you now understand the events of your childhood. 
• The most important thing about any memory is the way this experience made you feel at the time—or how you feel about it now. The emotions are more important than the exact details. 
• You are free to tell the story your way. If somebody else tells the same story, it will be different. That's okay. Let them write their own version. 

If you do this, you will have made an all-important first step in recording the stories of your life. If you write even one story down, it can be a way for your children (and future generations) to get to know you. You will be more than a name on a chart or a tombstone. 

I hope you will choose to keep writing the stories, collecting them over time.


And then what?

You may decide to write your memoir as a book and try to get it published by a big name publisher. Go for it.

You may make a memory book to give to your children and grandchildren as a Christmas present. 

You may pass on your stories in other forms—as a memory box or a memory quilt, a scrapbook or a photo album. You may choose to record your own voice telling the stories or to make a movie. Technology has blessed us with so many options. But even if you do these things, there’s still something about writing down the stories that helps us make sense of the puzzle pieces of our lives--and to insure that they will be passed down to generations to come. 

The Persistence of Memory, Salvadore Dali

Einstein said that time slows down as we approach the speed of light. Big deal. My "vintage" Beretta will barely get up to 80 mph--downhill, with a tailwind. But we can make time go backwards and even stand still when we write down the stories of our lives.


ASSIGNMENT: 1.) Start writing the stories! Choose three memories--from your list or not--and start getting them down on paper.
2.) Just for fun, can you think of a theme-song for each decade of your life? Be silly or serious.


To read Part III, The Extraordinary Ordinary, click here.

Your Life Is a Story

The sun sets over a farmhouse in Kentucky. Paint peeling, white gauzy curtains hanging in the frosty windows. A little boxer dog is yapping. It’s a Sunday night in November, just four days until Thanksgiving.

In this house live a man and his wife, both forty years old, and their two teenage sons. The wife—everybody calls her Chick—is eight months pregnant with one of life’s little surprises.

Chick doesn’t eat dinner that night because she isn’t feeling well. The man asks the boys to clean up.  As the hours pass, Chick feels worse and worse. Finally, her husband throws a coat around her shoulders and drives her to the hospital twenty miles away. They admit her right away. She has a bad case of toxemia and she is in labor.

This is an era of big cars and ladies wearing big hats to church, an era when nurses are all women in white dresses and fathers-to-be are shuffled off to the waiting room.

He waits. Someone hands him a cup of coffee. Then another. A big wall clock  marks the passing time while he counts the squares in the beige and brown linoleum. This is taking too long. Why don’t they tell him something? Finally a nurse comes out and taps him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she says. And the word seems to echo down the corridors. Sorry, sorry, sorry.  “I’m sorry, but the baby is dead, and we don’t expect your wife to make it through the night.”

The words hang in the air like thick black smoke, awful and unreal. His heart is in his throat. What will he tell his sons? How will he get through this?

“Can I see my wife?

"I'm sorry.” There’s that word again. “The doctor is with her.”

Sorry. He paces and prays, paces and prays. The baby is dead. He is no longer conscious of the floor tiles or the nurses whispering or the clock hands spinning or the people passing in the halls.  We don’t expect your wife to make it…

Sunlight comes through the windows. Outside, a half moon still lingers as commuters make their Monday morning trek back to work. But for this man, none of that matters. Somehow the night has passed, and the nurse comes out again. She looks tired. 

God, please. No more bad news. No more sorry.

The nurse brushes her damp hair from her face. “It’s a girl,” she says. “And she’s alive. Would you like to see your wife now?”

I know this story well, because the man told it to me many times. I am that baby girl, and my mother lived to watch me grow up.

Our lives are made up of little stories like this one—some touching, some funny, some seemingly insignificant. Together they form a mosaic that tells a bigger story, the story of our life as a whole. Put many lives together and they tell a greater story of a nation or an era. Put all the little stories together and they tell the story of mankind.  

When we think about “stories,” we think about the stories in books and legends and myths and movies. Or the stories our mother read to us when we were young. Or perhaps the stories of celebrities or historical figures or politicians.  It’s easy to forget about the story nearest to our hearts—the story of our own lives. So many of these precious stories are never told, never written down for our great great grandchildren to know about us and the life we lived. 

How sad to be just another name on a genealogical chart. 


      Born April 14, 1926. 
      Died January 6, 2007. 


I’d much rather leave a story or two to go with the name. That day in childhood when I mixed random household chemicals together and invented rubber. (My mom never knew.) My fifteenth birthday, when Kennedy was assassinated. The winter night of the big meteor shower when our family stayed outdoors all night, freezing our tail feathers off. And I still had to go to church the next morning and lead worship. 

"Chick"

These aren't great historical happenings. They are significant only to me, but they say a lot about who I am and what I treasure.


But how to begin?


Here's something you can do this week.

The Girl Who Lived
(Take that, Harry Potter!)

Make a table or spreadsheet with a column for each decade of your life. In each column list five memories associated with each decade. Just five. It's easy. One memory will trigger another. You don't have to "write them up." Just a simple list of memories and stories others have told you about yourself--like the story about my birth recounted above. And gather a few photos of yourself from different ages too. The photos may help you with your list.


That's all. Just a list and a few photos. And next week, we'll talk more about ways to move from the list to a story--the story of your life.


To read Part Two of this series, "Your Life Is a Treasure," click here.