Annelore is one of four writers in the memoir class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center who was born in a foreign country. She met her American husband Roy in the small town they both worked in on the Czech border, and the two of them moved to his hometown in North Dakota 55 years ago. Roy’s work relocated their family to many different places before finally settling in Chicago, and we are delighted to have her in class with us. I was especially tickled when she used my What I Hope For prompt to write about a New Year’s resolution she came up with back in 1963, her first year in America.

by Annelore Chapin

During my first years in this country I suffered from deep homesickness. Twenty years old, I felt cut off from everyone and everything I knew. I longed to stay connected with family and friends. The solution to ease my woes was to correspond by mail.

Maybe some day we can walk into one of these things and beam anywhere we want.

A letter to Europe would take about 14 days to arrive, and, should there be an answer, that would have to travel for another 14 days. Telephone calls were extremely expensive and were charged by the minute. We used the phone only in emergencies. My quest to stay in touch with everyone ‘back home’ resulted in an idea: On the first day of every year I would make a resolution. I would write one letter every day.

For a few weeks I did well, but eventually I fell behind. By March my backlog was so great that I gave up. The following year, I would try again. And the year after that. And after that. And then a miracle happened. The World Wide Web was created, and suddenly…”You’ve Got Mail!” A message a day became easy.

Had I ever hoped for this to happen? Of course not, and that taught me one thing: I can hope for things as yet unimaginable. Things like a transporter machine.

We know these contraptions from Star Treck, where they can move Captain Kirk or Scottie from one planet to another. Or from Dr. Who, who’s telephone booth transporter takes him from one time period to another one. At a time when my children and grandchildren live too many miles away to hug them on a regular basis, and friends around the globe are getting too frail to travel, I long for a method to move across space, from here to there, in seconds. And at ease.

Some of my friends who are “conspiracy believers” even insist that our governments already developed this technology. It might seem far-fetched now, but that is what I hope for: a transporter machine. Hope is defined as”the optimistic attitude of mind based on the expectation of a positive outcome,” and I am an optimist!

The announcement of the final writing prompt for 2017 was met with a chorus of groans. “What I hope for?” they asked. “For what? For Christmas? When? You mean you want an essay about what I’d do if I won the lottery? Is that what you mean? The Chicago Bears winning a game this year…can I write about that?”

A hope isn’t the same as a wish, as Mel explains.

I send an email to writers after class each week to re-enforce what their assignment is, and to offer suggestions to anyone with writer’s block. The “What I Hope For” email suggested they think about something special they’ve been hoping for this holiday, or something they hope will happen in the New Year. If they wanted to take an easier route, I suggested they write about something they really hoped for as a kid. Or as a teenager. Or as a young adult. “Did you get it? Was it all you hoped for?” Orrrr, they could think about a family member, or maybe a historian, reading their essay 100 years from now. “People reading our memoirs in the 22nd Century might wonder what we were hoping for back in 2017.”

My suggestions weren’t much help. “The things I have hoped for over the years are so numerous I simply cannot pick one ‘hope’ for a 500-word essay,” Pat read out loud from her essay the next week. “The challenge to write about ‘hope’ is bigger than I expected (or hoped).”

Michele said it all in her opening line, where she hoped to not be thrown out of her Monday memoir class for not doing her assignment. “I hope for your forgiveness,” she wrote. “And since I only used 193 words, I hope it is possible to set up a savings account for 307 extra words to use in a later essay.” Another writer acknowledged in her essay that she fervently hopes and prays there is a heaven. “But I’m in no hurry to find out!”

Diana took me up on the idea of a gift she’d hoped for as a child. When she was five years old, her family spent Christmas with a farm family in Pennsylvania. She can’t remember the family’s name, or why it was that her family celebrated there, but she does remember what she hoped for that year: a doll that came in her own little suitcase. “It was a real suitcase with a latch, and you could use it as a place to store her.” Diana did get a doll for Christmas, but it wasn’t the doll she wanted. The daughter of the family she was staying with got Diana’s doll.

Looking back, Diana guesses the doll was too expensive for her family to buy for her. “I wanted to love my new doll, but I didn’t,” she wrote.
“At that age, I had no concept of money, except that we didn’t have much of it.” Diana continued her essay, describing how that experience seventy years ago changed her. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted something that bad again, because I did not want to ever feel that disappointed again. I’m only aware of this now, as I write this essay.”

And then there’s Mel, who took the assignment as an opportunity to weigh the differences between hoping and wishing:

Hopes are not the same as wishes. The genie gives Aladdin three wishes. He doesn’t give him three hopes. Hopes are things that must develop over time. Wishes are things that can happen without any effort or preparation, no matter how impossible they seem.

Mel’s essay pointed out that older adults understand that a lot of the things they might have hoped for when they were young are not likely to happen now. “They belong in the realm of wishes, not hopes,” he said, using the dreams of a boy and a grown man as an example. “A twelve-year-old boy who is five and a half feet tall can hope that he grows to six feet. It may not be likely, but he knows from experience that it is possible,” he wrote. “On the other hand, a forty-year-old man who is six feet tall might wish that he were six foot-three, but he cannot hope for it. He knows that forty-year-old men do not have growth spurts.”

The stories of unfulfilled hopes were poignant–and left me thinking about a writing prompt for future classes: Acceptance.

via GIPHY

Slept in.

Coffee.

Opened presents.

Poached eggs.

Put pot roast in oven.

Took a walk in the snow.

Ate pot roast.

That’s all I have folks, except…

…Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

You can still beat the clock!

Mike, Seeing-Eye dog Whitney and I are taking a train to Wisconsin tomorrow to visit our son Gus for the weekend, and while we’re away our niece Janet and her kids are staying at our place to enjoy Christmassy Chicago.

So, like so many others, Mike and I are running around packing, shopping and cleaning. In a last-minute gift rush, I managed to figure out how to send Writing Out Loud to Kindle users as an e-book. Had no idea that was even possible — the things I’ve learned since getting this new book published! It seems fairly easy to accomplish:

1. From the Kindle Store in your desktop browser, select the book you want to purchase as a gift.
2. On the product detail page, click the Give as a Gift button.
3. Enter the personal email address of your gift recipient, or select “Email the gift to me” to let you forward the gift by email or print a card to deliver in person (the person who gets the gift can log into the Amazon account and enter the Gift Claim Code there).
4. Enter a delivery date and an optional gift message.
5. Click Place your order to finish your gift purchase using your Amazon 1-Click payment method, or to enter payment/billing information.

Okay. As Flo would say, “I’d better get cuttin’.” Happy holidays!

‘Tis the season to be merry.

And for anyone fortunate enough to live long enough, ‘tis the season to fend off, wrestle with, accept, crumble in a cloud of wadded up Kleenex, or do whatever it takes to deal with the ache we have for those who are not around to be merry anymore.

As we age, the number in the latter group grows. But practice doesn’t make perfect. It doesn’t get easier. There’s tons of advice, books, groups, but there is no grieving blueprint. Grief seems to have a life of its own, and does what it wants with us.

There are some common triggers—like the holidays, birthdays, family get-togethers, anniversaries. But it can be anything. Some little occurrence—“that’s when I would’ve phoned my mom if she were still around…” that reminds us of the void.

But there are other moments. Sometimes when I’m cooking I put music on. There’s a Todd Rundgren song that contains the lyric,

“The one that showed me kindness,
is the one who taught me kindness.”

Our son Gus got to feel the whiskers, too.

Every single time I hear it, whether I’m chopping or stirring, I can feel my dad’s razor stubble on my cheek (my dad’s five o’clock shadow tended to show up after lunch). I’d felt it when we hugged, and I feel it like he’s here. And each time I say, “thank you” in my head. In other cultures his appearance might be considered a spirit. In ours, I might be prescribed more medication.

I’ve been thinking of all this as I’ve been on the periphery of too many people dealing with loss over the past few months. Beth’s sister Bobbie died a couple months ago—Bobbie and her husband Harry hosted our wedding in their backyard. Then last week, Bobbie’s daughter Lynne died — meaning Lynne’s daughters lost their beloved grandmother and mother in rapid succession. Beth lost a sister, and then, a niece.

Too many friends have lost parents and other loved ones over the past few months. And we lost Anna Perlberg, one of Beth’s students, just a couple weeks ago.

In Anna’s case and in Beth’s sister Bobbie’s case, they left gifts. Bobby left a diary. Anna left memoirs she wrote as a student in Beth’s class, and a whole, wonderful book, called The House in Prague.

The stories people leave are transcendent. They’re funny sometimes, but not always happy. Sometimes they’re heartbreaking. They remind us that people are flawed and wonderful and remarkably resilient. They provide a window on the authors, a window that their survivors can open any time they want to get a whiff of their lost loved one.

Which is all to say, get the old-timers in your life to tell their stories. As a callow kid I found the details of my parents lives tedious. I’d give anything to hear them today.

It can be writing 500 words at a time via Beth’s Writing Out Loud method. But it can be as simple as sitting down and recording conversations or taking notes. Or going to StoryCorps.

And think about telling your own stories for those you leave behind, too.

With that, I leave you with a poem by an ancient Jewish philosopher named Yehuda Halevi. When I listened to it on an episode of Fresh Air last week, it reminded me there is no inoculation against grief, and there is no cure for it either. But maybe that’s the way it should be.

‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch – a fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, 

To be – to be and, oh, to lose – a thing for fools, this, and a holy thing – a holy thing to love, 

For your life has lived in me. Your laugh once lifted me. Your word was a gift to me. 

To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love – a holy thing to love what death has touched.