Vaclav Havel smoking a cigarette on an empty Prague street.
The exact moment my father gave up trying.
The inside of a Yugoslav military interrogation room.
Purple Rain-era Prince browsing alone in the record store where I worked.
Crying like a baby when Ali lit the Olympic torch, his arm shaking.
Arriving to my best friend lying in the street, t-boned on his scooter by a pickup truck.
Walking alone on an endless mountain road toward Montenegro, snow falling, late afternoon, no ride.
First morning in Prague, spilling my jar of breakfast goulash on my only jeans.
First morning in Africa, the sun, the seller-calls from the street.
The strange man following 14-year-old me home from the bus, peering at me from behind a tree.
My roommate leaving my dirty dishes piled by the front door since I must not have seen them in the sink.
A terrifying late-night childhood encounter with a ‘witch’, who turned out to be our schoolmate’s mentally ill mother.
That time I accidentally walked out into a Kosovo minefield.*
As an exercise, I wanted to see if I could distill a few of my most enduring memories into a single sentence each. Not so much the big ones, the less obvious fragments that have nestled into my memory bank over a lifetime. These were among the first that came to mind in one sitting.
Number one rule, they had to be moments that don’t have pictures. Photo-less word-photos. Captions for photos that don’t exist. We often take a picture to remember, but so many of our lives’ most resonant moments - large and small - are the ones not photographed.
My mother has dementia. So memory and forgetting are on my mind, so to speak. What do we do if our most important memories don’t have photos to back them up? What if the day comes that we can’t summon them any more?
Write them down. Try it as a meditation as well as a writing exercise. No, not in the usual long-winded way. Each one its own ‘micro-memoir’.
Resist the urge to exaggerate or make them more colorful. No frills or breathless embellishment. No before or after. Just the actual moment itself, pared to the bone, like the text equivalent of a snapshot. Edit them down to as much a blunt statement of fact as possible. My parameter was one sentence and it had to be something I actually saw. I left out ones that were too personal to ever share, we all have those too.
All that was my way, do it your way. Don’t do it to impress anyone, just for yourself.
Keep them safe, one day you might need them.
What would your short list of micro-memoirs look like? What images do you conjure?
I’m reminded of one of the greatest short monologues in cinema history, a mere 42 words.
*(That one has a photo, see above)
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