Five-Minute Memoirs

These are stories I prepared to tell at local storytelling events. So far I haven’t been picked to speak, but I’ve been ready! The rules I abide by are that the stories are true, happened to me, are told without notes, and take five minutes or less to tell. Inspired by the theme for an event, I write down a rough draft of my story. Then I read it aloud, revise, read again, revise, practice telling the story without notes, revise some more. I look for signposts to help me memorize the shape of the story. I memorize and practice particular wording if an area trips me up. I write the signposts on a notecard to review during breaks between stories at the event — but if my name gets called, the notecard will stay in my pocket. Meanwhile, the final written version of my story is on my laptop at home. And now, it’s here on my website.

The Test

Note: this story was for an event with the theme “Goodbyes.”

My grandmother died when I was fifteen. My initial reaction was sadness -- that I wasn’t more sad.

I only got to see my grandma a few times a year. She lived in the Bay Area, and I lived here in LA. I was shy on the phone and she was reticent in person, so while we were pen pals for a while, I didn’t really get to know her. 

We drove up to be with my grandfather. We had to leave our dog in LA. She had been ill for a few months, with barely any appetite. The vet couldn’t figure it out, and she got so thin we could see her skeleton under her scrubby white curls. It wasn’t hard to leave her, though. We’d be back in a few days, and anyway the priorities were obvious. 

All I can remember about Grandma’s funeral is that I didn’t cry. I felt like I should have, I wanted to, but I couldn’t. You have to understand, when I was a kid, I thought I knew a good test for whether or not you loved someone. For example, once in a while I would worry that maybe I didn’t love my parents -- was I a weird kid? -- and I would say to myself, “Would I cry if they died?” And if the answer was “Yes,” then I loved them. So you see, I had failed the test for loving my grandma, and I felt awful.

Then we got a phone call, and I felt worse. My grandfather actually took the message: my dog had died. So now of course, the tears wanted to come. I felt horribly guilty, and worried that Granddad would notice I hadn’t cried for Grandma, yet I wanted to just bawl for my dog. I ran cross-country back then, and I took a long run so I could cry without him knowing. I realize now that my face must have got blotchy and puffy. Hopefully he thought I had been crying about Grandma. 

We went home, and several months went by. Grandma’s passing didn’t affect my routine, and while I missed my dog’s presence every day, eventually her food dish and bed and toys weren’t around anymore, I stopped expecting the jangle of her collar every time I came home, and she became a happy memory, a closed chapter, a part of my childhood. But I realize that I never ended the chapter about Grandma and me.

I’m obviously all grown up now. I still live in LA, but instead of visiting my grandparents in the Bay Area, I visit my children. My first grandchild was born a few years ago, and while I was up north to visit the new baby, I found myself in Mountain View. There are plenty of new houses and condos in Mountain View, but there are also homes and shops that are clearly “mid-twentieth century classics.” They would have been there when Grandma lived nearby. I found myself thinking about her now that I was in her shoes. Did we have more in common than I could imagine as a kid? Driving the same streets she had, I wished I could have been closer to my grandma. I ached to talk with her, as an adult, and get to know her as a person. And finally, that day -- thirty-five years after she died - I passed the test and cried for my grandma.

That Joy

Note: this story was for a December 2019 event with the theme “Joy.”

Twenty-four years ago at this time, my family and I had just moved into a new house, and I was as big as a house myself -- seven months pregnant with our third child. My husband and I took naming our kids really seriously. Such a huge responsibility! Your child, whom you love more than anything, will live with this name, answer to it, be pre-judged by it. We followed a few guidelines. We wanted a first name and a middle name, and I was born and raised Catholic, so it was important to me that one of the names be a saint’s name. My husband’s family is from India, so we wanted one of the names to be Indian, and it had to be a name I could pronounce. I’ve had the experience of calling an Indian restaurant to make reservations and have the maître d’ laugh at how I pronounced my own last name. I didn’t want to have that experience with my kids’ names.

We work best with a deadline, and we discovered that for baby names, practically speaking, the deadline was whenever the mother and baby were released from the hospital, since we had to complete the form for the birth certificate before leaving. When our first child was born, in Canada, even with a completely uncomplicated birth, that meant we had five days from birth until we had to make a decision. And we used every minute. Our second baby was born here in California, and we had only two days after she was born to settle on her name. The way things were going by the time this third baby was on the way, we knew our HMO would try to get us out of the hospital within twenty-four hours. We figured we’d better be ready with a name before the baby was born. And this was back in the day when our prep work was double -- we didn’t know if the baby was a boy or a girl.

We were in pretty big trouble if Baby #3 was a boy -- we had no good ideas. But for a girl, we had narrowed down the first-name choices to two saints’ names. Then, for a middle name, I found and fell in love with the Hindi name “Ananda,” which the baby name book told me meant “joy.”  Perfect. The name is beautiful, and we love the meaning.

There was a little snag. If there are any Hindi speakers here in the audience, you caught it. I said “Ah-nan-dah,” but that’s not right. The name is supposed to be pronounced something like “Ah-nun-dah,” which I have trouble saying and don’t like the sound of as much. But I loved the name. I decided to relax the rule that I had to be able to pronounce it properly. I figured maybe Hindi speakers would indulge me, and treat me like they might a parent who decides to give their child’s name a whimsical spelling. 

But then we ran into a big snag. I love reading to my kids, and at this time we were reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet together. This is a sequel to A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. A new character is introduced, a dog. A dog named Ananda.

I thought, oh no! The baby will read this book some day. I don’t want her to think she’s named after a dog! We couldn’t use the name Ananda. 

We kept looking for a name, but we kept reading, too, a couple of chapters a night. We discovered that Ananda is a magical dog. Maybe it would be alright to name the baby after a magical dog? Maybe. I kept thinking about it.

And we kept reading. And at some point the book defines the dog’s name. I don’t have the book handy any more, but this is how I always remembered the definition the book gives: Ananda means, “that joy without which the universe would collapse.”

That sealed it. If this baby reads A Swiftly Tilting Planet someday and finds that she shares a name with a magical dog, and that the name means, “that joy without which the universe would collapse” -- I think she’ll be alright with it. As it turns out, Baby #3  was a girl, and we did use “Ananda” for her middle name. I still mispronounce it. And I’ve told her this story, and she actually grew up to be a person who says she is honored to share her name with a dog in any case. She thinks all dogs are magical. And our whole family can confirm that we picked the right name, since our Ananda has from Day 1 brought us “that joy without which the universe would collapse.”