Barbara J. Hamby

Buried Memory Tidbits

Last night at the Memoir Writing group meeting, someone mentioned working at a radio station and triggered a memory I’d forgotten. I’ve written a long story about all the jobs I’ve held during my life, but omitted the brief time I typed logs at a local radio station where my then-husband had a talk show. He called it Your Opinion, but I thought he should have named it My Opinion because he did the most talking. I think it was only a few months that we did that; I can’t remember exactly.

I think I may have mentioned before that, in a writing class, someone wrote about hollyhock dolls and I remembered seeing dolls made from those flowers when I was a child.

Something someone else said reminded me that I haven’t written about the fact that my paternal grandfather was a veteran of the Spanish American War and also participated in World War II in the Merchant Marines.

Today I’ve been editing a story I wrote approximately fifteen years ago about six high school friends, women in their sixties, who gathered at my house for a slumber party and a night of reminiscing. That’s a fun memory that I’m glad I recorded at that time. Two of those women are now deceased and at least three of us are in our eighties, I’ve lost contact with the other one and I’m not sure how old she is.

As an interesting coincidence, I wrote about economy of words recently, and yesterday I learned that Reader’s Digest is having a contest that will pay $25,000 for the best life story of 150 words or less. That’s a tempting offer. I wonder if I could reduce my story about being lost in Shanghai to 150 words. It’s much harder to make a story shorter than longer.

0 Comment(s) about this entry.  |  Permalink