Life, Writing, Weirdness

Just in case anyone is curious, but this is rather longer than my typical post, probably pushing close to 2,000 words by the time you get to the end. TLDR: 10 volumes of my memories, a slim volume of family stories I’ve managed to collect, a photo album with commentary of key family photos and artifacts, volumes to contain everything I’ve been able to find written by my mother or father. If that’s the level of information you need about this gargantuan task, feel free to skip to the end from here.

If you’re still reading, buckle in.

Some small amount of time after my fiftieth birthday, I finally decided to treat the memory project as a serious undertaking and knew it would be a lifelong one, or at least the rest of my life from that time on. As things stand, it doesn’t divide my life up by major events but by major changes that shifted things fundamentally. It also seems like I can look ahead to what a couple of those will be so that I’m able to see my life in ten discrete volumes, most of the volumes between here and catching up to the present with some still in-flux number of chapters and sections, and an unknown number of chapters in the volumes that still lie in my future.

Once I finish a volume, I don’t intend to do any major additions, but there’s always the chance that I’ll remember something so important that I need to include it.

In the background, there’s also a fairly significant tracking spreadsheet at work, and anyone who’s ever gotten to know me even a little won’t be at all surprised by that fact. It’s likely the spreadsheet has grown with time and may even survive my death, but I’ll leave it to whoever takes care of sorting out my files to decide if it’s worth preserving on its own or not. I’d suggest not, but that will depend on how whoever it is feels about whatever insights it might give into how my mind works. Or worked at that point.

The volumes in the project that are specifically about me:

Volume 1: The Kid

My birth until the end of June 1982 when we left British Columbia to settle in Ontario for my father’s final postings in the Air Force. My earliest memories are fragmentary, as they are for most people since we’re not really built to consistently form long-term memories until we’re five or six, but there are a couple that might be from somewhere between my second and third birthday.

I think of this as “the childhood volume”, hence the title, but this will also be where I have the early impressions of my parents and the only memories of two of my grandparents.

Volume 2: The Teenager

June 1982 to August 1989. The last two years of public school, taken in Ontario, high school, and the gap year I wound up taking before leaving for my first round of studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In almost any reckoning, the high school years are considered formative. I’m not saying that’s particularly true for me, but it is absolutely true for me. People who grow up all in one place sometimes have friends for their entire lives. My wife has two she met as a small child, but high school is the place where that starts to become true for me.

Volume 3: The University Student

September 1989 to April 1994. My first University Career. The fall out from that comes later, and in some ways is still affecting me today, but in spite of how this period of my life ended, there are a lot of good memories, and a lot of important ones, during these years. The period covered is short, but it deserves its own volume.

Volume 4: On Our Own

May 1994 to 19 December 1998. From the time I left Queen’s until Erik’s birth, the day we stopped being a couple and became a family instead. This seems like a shorter volume, but there are some key events happening in here, too. Things like getting married and buying our first house.

Volume 5: Fatherhood

This is, so far, the volume covering the longest period, though it probably won’t wind up being the longest volume. From Amanda’s birth and coming home until I changed jobs on 16 November 2016. I will never stop being a father, and it will always be my primary focus, but as your children get older, they need you less frequently (although sometimes in a much bigger way), and your life does continue as they grow.

I almost made the dividing line my son’s departure for university, but that seemed a bit unnatural since his sisters were both still at home. He would return after second year, which makes an even stronger argument that the life change of moving to a new job in Belleville that completely changed my professional path is a fault line that’s easier to measure from.

Like every volume, most of the things I share in this one will be about how things affected me as I experienced them. I’m not going to tell my children’s stories except as key shared experience. Their stories are theirs to tell, not mine.

Volume 6: The Belleville Years

17 November 2016 to 20 March 2020. The day I started at the Belleville casino to the day I got sent home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything changed from there, a lot of it in ways I had no way to predict or even guess at when we shut down “for a few weeks” (we were expecting that few to be somewhere between six and ten). These years marked a lot of professional growth for me, and not always in the way I expected. They also marked a return to the idea that I had to work ridiculously hard to make sure my family had all the stability it needed. This cost me and them a lot emotionally, but for a long time, I didn’t see another way out of things.

Volume 7: Starting Over

Covering what I consider the current period of my life, 21 March 2020 to whenever the end of my second academic career winds up being. The original plan for going back to school was for that academic career to result in my becoming a high school science and math teacher. By the time I was finished first year, I thought I might want to do a Masters degree as well. By the time I finished second year, I was leaning heavily towards an academic path. That’s where I am now. The education degree isn’t off the table, but will depend on how I feel about midway through the MSc. Do I like research enough that it’s what I want to spend the rest of my professional years doing? That’s the question that needs to be answered.

Volume 8: The Final Career(s)

Originally, this was anticipated as a teacher and writer. That may wind up being very different, but the writer part will always be important to me. My phrasing used to be, “We’ll see where my studies take me. I’m not at all afraid to fall in love with the academic life and go on to graduate-level degrees.” Or something like that. The possible idea was an MSc on the way to Teacher’s College. That became the goal at one point, and there was a lot of work to keep the possibility in my grasp to get into the accelerated program at Queen’s. I think things turned out well, but I haven’t quite decided where I’m going after that. Not yet, at least.

Volume 9: The Golden Years

Retirement for real. What activities take the place of work? What hobbies will I finally get to pursue? What new and incredible things will I learn now that I’m left completely to my own devices to occupy my time? How much more will I manage to turn into writing? Will I ever catch up to the end of the list of ideas I currently have? (The answer to that last question is a firm no. New ideas happen all the time. I’ll never cover off the list.)

Typing this, I’m probably still fifteen-ish years from answering the rest of those questions. Early, or even on time, retirement isn’t in the cards for most folks in my generation. I fully expect to be in my mid-70s before I dial things back to full retirement. Maybe part-time by the time I hit 70.

But I’ll still be writing.

Volume 10: The Final Years

The title makes this one seem self-explanatory, if a bit maudlin, but it also assumes I see the end coming, which makes it a completely theoretical volume. Barring accident or sudden and serious illness, there should come a time when I know I’m in my last years, months, or even days. I will keep writing, as much as I’m mentally and physically able to, until the end. It’s possible this volume could be extremely short. It’s also possible that it could pre-empt earlier planned volumes if that end seems to be coming earlier or faster than I expected or hoped for. And it’s possible I might not even get to write more than an introduction to it.

It’s almost certain there won’t be any kind of definite conclusion unless I write one in advance. What are the chances I’ll wake up one morning and understand that it’s my last day of conscious existence? I’ll burn that bridge if I come to it, but someone else will have to take care of the preparation of this last volume.

And then there’s the stuff that isn’t about me, though it’s possible I’ll make an appearance here and there from someone else’s point of view. While my part of things spans ten volumes, I’ve plans for four more. One of which may be already complete, though I may find a bit more to go into it in a box I haven’t managed to go through properly yet. I’ve technically started on all three of the others.

Volume 11: Family Stories

Things that have been told to me over the years, written down so they won’t be lost after I’m gone. There are already a lot fewer of them than there might have been if I’d paid more attention when I was young, and I’ve lost opportunities to add a lot to them, but I try to keep my ears open now, and there are a lot of things I should ask about, if there’s anyone still to ask. To be philosophical for a moment, it’s part of the tragedy of human existence that by the time most of us are truly interested in things the older generation might share with us, we’re on the verge of becoming the older generation ourselves, having lost our grandparents’ generation and not talking enough to the people in our parents’ generation before we’ve lost the opportunity.

Volume 12: The Big Album

I barely started this one, but the vision is a visual family history of people and family artifacts. How big do I want to go with the photos? To be honest, I’m still scanning and categorizing. That might continue to be the case for a while. I’ve inherited a lot and there’s still most of it to go through.

Volume 13: Mom’s Writing

When Mom passed away, as we were slowly cleaning up the house, we found hidden family photos and old (sometimes very old) greeting cards with some of the only samples of my grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s (and others’) handwriting that I’m aware of. We also found a couple of things Mom had written. Not nearly everything because we know Mom used to write a little here and there, but she never showed it to anyone, and I think a lot of it disappeared. I keep hoping to find more, but this volume is as complete as I can make it at this point.

Volume 14: Dad’s Writing

Dad told me a few months after Mom died that he was working on his memoirs. I hope that’s still the case, but suspect it wasn’t much more than a momentary thought that he didn’t want to dig too far into. I have found a few things that are clearly Dad’s handwriting. He’s always been articulate, especially on paper, and when he’s making a reasoned argument, he can be pretty convincing. He’s occasionally had something published in the Ottawa Citizen. I’ve already got a handful of his letters to the editor bookmarked.

So I clearly still have a lot of work to do on this project, but I do have the rest of my life to get it done, however long that might be. The scope of things is a lifetime and more, but with only what remains of my lifetime to get it done. And see, well over 2000 words here.

Be well, everyone.