I remember.

In her magical book, Lift, Kelly Corrigan writes, “I heard once that the average person barely knows ten stories from childhood and those are based more on photographs and retellings than memory.”

When I read that, I immediately turned to Toby and reread it, aloud this time. “Is that true for you?” I asked.

He and I share a vast history and lots of stories. He did his customary furrowing of the brow while he thought. “I feel like I have thousands of memories,” he said.

I agreed. But I’ve been thinking a lot about what Corrigan said. And I’ve also been thinking about how one of the great gifts of my life is that I read Wild Mind – Living the Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg about a hundred years ago (okay, maybe thirty), in which she gives her first writing prompt on page 10. Under the headline Try This, she writes “Do a timed writing for ten minutes. Begin with “I Remember. . .”

This has remained my favorite writing prompt for years. (My second favorite is “I don’t remember.”)

I’m working on my second book right now, in the midst of a lot of other things like running the Cancer Foundation, selling homes to out of towners dying to live in Santa Fe, keeping my vegetable garden alive, trying to see sweet grandsons frequently enough, consulting with small groups on development, planning summer events for the Foundation’s Board of Directors. Life right now feels like chaos.

My favorite time, other than when Baby Milo and I are walking around outside surveying our two and a half acres or making the little garbage truck roll across the floor accompanied by his screams of happiness, is right now. This is when I get to put aside chaos and complexities and instead think about memory and gratitude and healing and rewriting our lives so that we create what Brene Brown calls a brave new ending.

Do you only know ten stories from childhood?

Do you remember the smell of your first grade classroom? The games you played on the playground during recess, your best friend from third grade and the dress she wore that you wanted so badly, the taste of your grandmother’s red velvet cake? Do you remember the night sky as you drove home from Grandma’s on Christmas Eve, the anticipation of opening the gifts under the tree? Did you sit on the porch with the big black collie, letting him lick the barbecued rib juice off your little fingers? Do you remember cowering behind your mother’s legs when the marching band came down the street during a parade? Because I do.

I feel like I have thousands of memories.

“I remember. . .” is my favorite writing prompt because I have so many memories. These days I’m trying to put them in a pile so that the chapters in Where I Come From will flow from my own truth rather than from me having to search my chaotic brain.

I keep my Remarkable tablet nearby and have a folder entitled “I remember” in which I jot down random memories like the time I sat on Grandma Ayres’ counter at the old place out at Porter and drank a Tab, her standing nearby, mixing up something to put in the oven. They moved to Tucumcari in 1964, so I must have been three at the time. She always had soft drinks available for her grandkids, whether they were eighteen or three years old, like me.

If you have a hard time remembering, play a song from your childhood.

I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago about how grateful I was for hymns, how those church songs were the songs of my childhood and a comfort in my (not so) old age. But there is other music that stirs my memory.

The “Oklahoma” soundtrack was one of the few non-church albums I listened to before I started school. For some reason, Mom trusted me to load the LP onto the record player. I listened to it over and over. Gordon MacRae singing “O What a Beautiful Morning” sounded just like my Daddy and the songs he sang as he came in from the barn to join us at the breakfast table. It still makes me smile. I feel like the world is full of possibilities when I hear that song, whether it’s in my head or on my computer.

Switching gears, all I have to do to remember being five years old and the first time I danced to the Beach Boys, this time in the living room of my Uncle Herman and Aunt Jackie, is to search Youtube for “Drive In” by the Beach Boys. I grew up the baby of dozens of cousins, and Mark Ayres had to coax me off the couch to dance with him, while my bigger and much cooler cousins danced around me. There are no photos, so I know this memory is true, that I was thrilled to dance with my handsome cousin, excited to be included with the older kids.

What do you remember? What memories are you most grateful for this morning? Open up Youtube and find a song or two – take a listen to “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog” and see if it doesn’t take you back to junior high. The year it was released was the year we invented kissing tag, where we ran around Shelley and Glena’s backyard, tagging boys and then kissing them.

Everyone wants to be a writer, or at least that’s what I hear. But they can’t think what they should write about.

Start with “I remember. . .” Play an old song you love. And watch the magic begin.

By the way, the photo is my preschool photo. You can’t tell from my expression, but I was trying to hold my smile still so I wouldn’t cry. I was frightened to be in school, where I knew they’d make me go the next year without my mother by my side. I wasn’t always so brave.

Some days I still feel like that little girl with the wide smile, quaking inside but determined to get through the day.

Thanks for checking in.