What Time is It?
Having your heart running around in the larger world
Split Lip Magazine is featuring my bit of memoir, “What Time is It?” the opening chapter of my larger memoir, CHRISTMAS IN BEDLAM, in their May issue.
You can find “What Time is It?” here.
My piece opens with a neurologist asking the reader to draw an analog clock face. This test, the clock face test, is a tool used to diagnose dementia. The details of the test have been haunting me for a decade now, but after writing, then editing, both the book and this smaller piece, those details have taken a smaller space in my mind.
Another chunk of the book, the third chapter, “Mom’s Dead,” comes out in August in Alien magazine. I will post a link when it comes out.
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This process of memoir, both the writing of them and then seeing them come out in print, is an odd business. It’s like writing out little pieces of your heart and then letting them loose into the world. It’s thrilling, but part of that thrill is the fear of exposing your actual self, and your actual life, to the view of the world. Having fiction published is a similar feeling, but there is always the guise of fictionality to hide behind. Memoir offers no such shelter.
I suppose in that way it is like parenthood. You’ve heard the old saw about having children is like having little pieces of your heart running around in the world. And that’s true as well. Having a grandson running around in the world only amplifies the feeling (hi, Eli!).
Lately, with the grandpa-fication of my brain over the last few years, I’ve been leaving my heart in all sorts of places, and noticing when people are letting their own hearts out for a little fresh air.
You are in the grocery store parking lot, just trying to get home to put your food away, and the ice cream is melting, and all the cars are jockeying for position to get inside the little white parking lines too small for the mega-pickups and giant SUVs that fill them, and suddenly there is a car right in front of you, and you are both in each other’s way. Fuck this noise. And then you both stop and look at each other. You make actual eye contact with the person in the other car. You nod, the other person nods. You achieve a moment of recognition: we are both human beings, caught up in this frustrating situation. Instead of honking, instead of trying to push your way through, you pull your cars awkwardly around each other, each making room for the other person to move, then find your respective ways home. Perhaps you exchange a parting smile. Perhaps you remember that exchange of smiles as you are putting away your semi-melted ice cream into the fridge.
That nod, that mutual workaround, that exchanged smile with a stranger, are all the small but meaningful rewards of letting your heart out to run around in the real world. It’s gratifying. But it requires a little effort.
Anyway. That’s what I’m feeling on the occasion of having a piece of my memoir published. It’s like nodding to someone else in the parking lot of a grocery store. Read it if you find the chance.
Peace.