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.

Writers in my classes who are downsizing into smaller apartments or senior living centers come to class musing about all the stuff they’ve accumulated over the years. What do they leave behind, I wonder. How do they decide?

I also wonder what writing assignment I might give to prompt them to answer those questions. Wonder no more! Sheila, a writer in my Wednesday class, emailed me a while back with a list of prompts she wanted me to assign. If you’re blind, can something still catch your eye? Maybe not. So, one of Sheila’s prompts catches my ear: “Write about Something in Your Closet.”

I like to use prompts that are vague and open to all sorts of possibilities, and this one would work in three different instances:

1. Writers who had moved lately could tell us about an item that passed the audition and made the trip to their new closets.
2. Writers still at home could write about something they’ve stowed away, and why they still have it.
3. Anyone in class with an urge to divulge family secrets could write about skeletons.

I assigned the prompt to all my December classes, and 97-year-old Wanda responded instantly. “Any of you remember the George Carlin skit called Stuff?” she laughed. “We all need a place for our stuff!”

I told writers who were uninspired by the prompt to go home, open a closet door and take a look. Pat did exactly that, opening her essay the next week describing herself standing in front of the closet in her entry hall and hesitating. “My closet is such a nag! If I open the four imposing bi-fold doors a big red neon light is going to start flashing, ‘To Do…To Do.’”

Carol hoped to avoid the nags from the closet in her condominium by hiring a residential professional organizing service to help her downsize. She moved to a smaller apartment six weeks ago, and the organizer was there to help her unpack as well. “Once again, with my daughter assisting, she was a whirlwind.” Dozens of boxes disappeared in nothing flat, she said. Dishes and pots and pans were all stacked in the right cupboards. The organizer also managed to cram everything from the large wardrobe containers into the only clothes closet in Carol’s new apartment. “Summer clothes are mixed with winter ones, longer items on one side, shorter things on the other…everything that I kept has to be somewhere in there, but where?” she asks. “What’s in my closet? I wish I knew!”

Mary moved recently, too, and wrote of how the closet in her new place haunts her at night now. ” I can almost hear my closet crying – it is so empty!” she wrote, explaining what had gone on once they’d decided to move. “I saw beloved old 78 records from my college years fly off into oblivion, years of Nativity scenes collected from all over the world escape back into other houses, stacks of papers disappear into shredding machines, and sets of dishes and silver and table linens vanish out the door.” Mary described the contents of her new lonely closet as “the belongings I have saved from the moving van, the charitable resale stores, the electronics recycling center, the backyard trash bin, the book dealers, my new best friend Phil at UPS, the far flung homes of our children, and the on-line auction clutches of Everything But the House.”

Bob and his wife Linda are still in the condo they’ve lived in for years, and he opened his essay with a decree. “There should be a marriage law that all closets should be divided equally between husband and wife,” he wrote. “Why is it that my wife’s closet is more than two-and-a-half times bigger than mine? Linda has clothes for all seasons, and if you ask her, she’ll tell you there are at least seven or eight seasons in Chicago.” Linda’s closet floors are covered with shoes, but he can count the things on his tiny closet floor in one hand: tool kit, box of hair styling equipment, shoe shine stand and a small stool where he sits to put on his shoes and socks.

That is, until Linda got a new office chair and made plans to take her old overstuffed heavy desk chair to their summer place in Indiana. “But in the meantime, where do you think her old chair is sitting?” he chuckled as he read out loud in class. “Well, it’s sitting right in front of the little stool I used to sit on to put on my shoes and socks.”

As for Sheila, the writer who’d suggested the prompt? She wrote about a uniform from her working days. “I’ve kept my Air Canada ticket agent uniform in the back of my closet FOR 34 YEARS,” she wrote. “I’m proud of my airline career. It was my identity.” Perhaps she can carve out a new identity now as the student who provides writing prompts for her memoir teacher. This was a good one!