The Writer at the Dump

One of my fondest memories from childhood has to do with the dump in my hometown of Kalispell, Montana.  I don’t know what kind of waste facility that city uses now, but, at the time, there was a large open pit where people would back up their pickup trucks and just throw things in.  Bags of garbage, paper, old sinks and toilets and sofas….and bicycles.   I only have one clear memory of being there, and I can’t have been more than five or six years old, as my father was there, and he died when I was seven.  There isn’t much of a memory - seeing the downslope into piles of things - and lots of flies - my father’s hand holding mine, the sound of his voice.  

What I do know about that memory beyond doubt is that it was part of my father’s gifts to his kids.  My family couldn’t afford to buy bicycles for six children, but my father had a full home shop.  At the dump, he salvaged parts from multiple bicycles and back home at his shop, built three bicycles for the three older girls in the family.  One was painted red, one blue, and one black.  Those three

bicycles were, over the years that followed, shared and passed down among all of us.  When I visited my mother’s home in my forties, the red and the blue still leaned against a wall in her garage.  It wasn’t possible to look at them without being flooded with memories- my sister Jean riding up the front walk on the red one, laughing until she fell off;  riding the blue one through a column of ants that invaded the town the summer I was twelve;  my sister Kathleen and I riding both down a hill east of town one year when we were home for a family reunion.

Those bicycles were made from bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam discarded by others, and they evoke bits and pieces of memories - flotsam and jetsam rising out of the murk of years past.  My father knew there was value in those discarded parts, and he sanded and polished and oiled until all of them came together in three brand new bicycles for three very excited girls.  Finding the value in memories takes no less work.  

I am currently reading Joshua Foer’s excellent book, Moonwalking with Einstein - in which he examines a movement to retrieve the kind of memory power that was the cornerstone of early civilization - the ability to remember huge amounts of information at a moment’s notice.  He details many methods for improving memory and recall, and he examines, sometimes humorously, the current efforts to offer everyone the training to perfect memory.  

The nature of memory has been a theme for me in my writing and in my studies for as long as I can remember. Theories abound.  But the nature of memory, how it functions within human consciousness, is elusive.  My favorite was a proposal mused aloud at a conference once by psychologist Karl Pribram who muttered, in discussing the nature of thinking using the metaphor of a hologram, “Perhaps the world is a hologram.”   He supposed that the entire nature of the human brain could be gleaned from any small piece of it, and the same with memory, and, he supposed, the same with reality.  

That notion suits how I think about the world.  And how I think about writing.  It took only the random thought that I needed to take some things to the dump to evoke the flash of memory of my father’s hand in mine, and the bikes he built, and the site of my sister Jean Marie laughing under her fallen bike, and sister Kathleen arms spread wide, speeding down an eastside hill ahead of me.  And it’s not much of a leap from there to the nature of the kind of life I’ve led, to an understanding of something essential to it.   

As students of writing, we are always being told to “show, don’t tell,” don’t bury your reader in exposition by telling them what kind of person your character is - instead, lead them to understand the character by showing the reader the life the character has lived.  Don’t write a biography (unless you need to for backstory) - build a picture of his life by showing the reader small pieces, like my father built a bicycle from parts taken from here, and from there. Build the character from the flotsam and jetsam of her or his memory. A red and a blue bike, leaned against the grey wall boards of an old garage, leading to an awareness of a full life.

To really bring your reader into the world of your character, you need to mine the depths of your own memory, find what it leads you to, and pay attention  - those memories will show you how a world is built, so that when a character steps into your mind, the world you build for that character will be one that will bring your reader home to their own memories.