Hope from the Ocean – Coming Sunday March 30, 2014!

Inside the Mind of the Author

After I chose this topic to write about, I started to take it back but then I though, “Where’s the fun in that?” The inside of this author’s mind isn’t completely uninteresting so perhaps, there’s something inside this big blond head that you may be interested in knowing. Besides, I have this agonizing way of not taking things back. I have things that do not fit or that I hated when I got home from the store or gadgets that just didn’t work but I just couldn’t take them back. I made the choice to bring those things into my world so I should be stuck with them, right?

Stuck is a good word for my mind. Things go in but they can’t get out.

I realized early on in life that I could draw and paint and did that pretty much daily until I could write, then I did them both. On that journey, I also realized I had the ability to remember things other people couldn’t and could draw and write things I’d seen or heard directly from memory but only if those things left an impression on me. These images did not necessarily have to be enclosed in what by most standards are major events. They just had to leave an imprint for some unknown reason. This has been a lifelong curse as much as it has a gift. I can still see Christmas Eve 1969. We were running up to my sister’s apartment next door after midnight. I can still look down at the sidewalk and see my pink furry slippers in the light bit of snow on that city street. Unfortunately, I can also vividly remember finding my sweet cat Pumpkin, bloody and lying dead beneath the tree outside of my sister’s apartment when I came home from school one day. He’d been hit by a car.

I don’t even have to close my eyes. The really rough part of it all is the emotional memories live in there too. That flash-memory of Christmas Eve makes my heart race and seeing poor Pumpkin in my mind can bring tears to my eyes and then anger. No, I couldn’t tell you what I wore the first day I ever went to school but I can tell you I was wearing a red and brown plaid dress and brown Mary Jane’s the day a goat ate a chunk of it at a petting zoo, on a Saturday at the old Glen Burnie Mall. I was about four or five. I was scared to death. I can still see that crazy goat dragging me along as I screamed for help. Stop laughing. Okay, go ahead and laugh, I’m sure most of the people at the mall did too.

Inside my mind is fifty years of memories, visuals, emotions and yes, even voices from my entire life and if you don’t believe me, I might as well not even bother to tell you about the day I was in WalMart and heard a woman speaking a few racks over and immediately said, “That’s Mrs. Morris, my first grade teacher!” It was. I hadn’t heard her voice in over twenty years. The true blessing in all of this mushed up gray matter is being able to remember the majority of every significant event in my life. They may fall into the category of what one may not think of as significant but to my brain, they were. Having a vivid imagination married with a photographic memory may not be a blessing if you’re trying to forget things but to a writer, it feels like you’ve been given a library of work that is yet to be written.