Time Travel--You Wouldn't Believe It Anyway

Raise your hand if you think about time travel?

I used to think about time travel a lot. Mostly for fun. But then I read Einstein. And I learned that time is actually space. And space is not linear. Space can warp and bend and fold back on itself.

So if time is not linear, what really holds us back from time travel?

From my current point of view as a hypnotherapist, I believe it is our minds.

For example, if you had come to me 5 years ago and said, "Hey, check out my time machine. Get in. I'll show your life a year from now." And you had shown me--my mind never would have accepted what it saw.

After years of interviewing people about their life stories, I know that this applies to most everyone. Things almost never turn out how we think they will. How many times have you said to yourself, "If you had told me a year ago I'd be here or doing this [wherever that is] now, I would never have believed you."

So maybe we can and do time travel all the time, but our minds protect us from what we see. And maybe at times there is leakage, in dreams. That's why some people are more psychic than others--more leakage--or more openness to the unknown.

What has happened in your life that you never would have thought possible 10 years ago?

The Family Tree of Knowledge

When I was a few months into my pregnancy and feeling alone, I came across this quote by Harriet Lerner:

“We are never the first in our family to wrestle with a problem, although it may feel that way…. Learning how other family members have handled their problems similar to our own down through the generations, is one of the most effective routes to lowering reactivity and heightening self-clarity."

I thought, “Yeah right? Who does this happen to? No one else in my family has been abandoned three months into a planned pregnancy.” I kept reading.

“If we do not know about our own family history, we are more likely to repeat past patterns or mindlessly rebel against them, without much clarity about who we really are, how we are similar to and different from other family members, and how we might best proceed in our own life.”

Since I was already passionate about genealogy and family history, I decided to test out this idea and have a look at my family tree to see if there were any single mothers that I had overlooked, and what, if anything, I could learn from them. To my great surprise, there were more than a few, and the details of their stories left me dumbfounded. For the purpose of brevity, I will share only two here.

The first was Ellen (my great-grandmother). She lived for a time in the Mexican colonies (that’s why I feel Mexican inside). She had four daughters with her husband, but after the fourth, he accused her of cheating on him. He said that Violet was not his child. With this announcement, he left her and moved back to the United States.

Life in Mexico at this time (early 1900’s) was tense. Pancho Villa, the revolutionary general in Chihuahua was suspicious of the white Mormon settlers. According to the colony’s history, he threatened to kill the white people if they did not leave. So Ellen and her four daughters, and the rest of their colony, fled Mexico with a few days’ notice--on foot. Ellen returned to the United States to her parent’s home in Cedar City, Utah, and lived with her family. She worked hard to support four children. Sometime later, she met her childhood sweetheart, married him, and had four sons—one of which is my grandfather.

If pioneer stories bore you, this next story is much different. It is from my father’s side. My father was adopted by his step-father (I guess that means my grandmother was a single mom for a while, too), and I had been trying to track his real father’s line for some time. A few years before, I had already discovered the big surprise—I am (blonde little me) of slave ancestry (that’s why I have always felt black inside). But I will save that story for another time and cut to the single mother: Maria Johns, my third-great-grandmother.

I found her in an 1860 census in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. She was listed as a single, black woman living with her young daughter, who was listed as Mulatto. Her occupation was “washer woman” and she was listed as owning property.

If your hair isn’t already blown back, I’ll give you a few more details. Maria was born in Virginia, so she was almost certainly born into slavery. Her child was mulatto, and she was never married, so I can only speculate about what master impregnated her and whether or not she was willing. How she escaped or earned her freedom is also speculation. What I do know is that 1860 was pre-emancipation proclamation, and it was rare even for white women to own property in 1860.

What this tells me about Maria Johns, is that she was awesome.

I found a few clues and rumors that Marie was a Quaker, which I believe, because the Quakers were in large number in that part of Pennsylvania, and were also the only group that would be accepting enough to embrace a black woman into their community and let her own property.

After learning these stories about my ancestors, I felt much less alone. I felt connected to these powerful women and inspired by them. I looked to what both of them (and others I found) did in their time of trial and saw that those who turned to their family and their faith were the most successful. I knew I would be wise to do the same.

By meditating on these and other strong women in my life stream, I felt them draw nearer to me. They would help me and lift me up. When my daughter was born, I felt them all surrounding me--my mother, my grandmother, Ellen, Maria and many more I didn’t even know, but who knew me and knew my daughter.

This was just the beginning of my journey with my ancestors. Since then, with each major struggle in my life, I consult my family history to see what I can learn. The results continue to amaze and humble me.

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Hello Anonymous

What's with all the anonymous comments? It seems that everywhere else in the blog world, people like everyone to know who left a comment. Because isn't it all about getting your name out there and having people link back and find your amazing blogs? Now suddenly we are getting a bunch of comments from anonymous. Makes me wonder. If you really want to be anonymous, you could keep your profiles private. So this begs the question: what kind of people leave anonymous comments. My mental search had come up with 3 kinds of people:

1. Spammers
2. Haters
3. Celebrities

These comments weren't advertising penis enlargement, and they had nothing nasty to say about my blog post, so that means that it must be celebrities. If not Steve than perhaps Tina Fey or someone that knows him. Sigh. I promise it's just a writer crush. Nothing serious. I had nothing to do with the rosebush incident.

Stalking Steve Martin

I have had a writer crush on Steve Martin for about a decade now. It started when I moved to New York in 1999 and started reading The New Yorker in earnest. One day I was reading a “Shouts and Murmurs” essay and laughing out loud. I thought," who is this guy?" I looked at the byline and saw the name Steve Martin. I wondered if it bothered the author that he had the same name as the also funny actor. I didn’t realize the author of my favorite essays was Steve Martin, the actor, until a few years later when I read his 2002 piece, “The Death of My Father.” It was a personal history, and his being Steve Martin the actor was important to the piece. As the title says, it was about his father dying. It was sad and beautifully written. I wept as I read, wondering why it takes death to finally understand our parents. This brought up another feeling. To put it into words, it was, holy crap, not only can this guy make me laugh out loud, but also weep.

There are certain writers, whose books I have loved, that I don’t ever want to meet. And there are those that, after reading them, I believe that we would be great friends. Annie Dillard is one of these (I read An American Childhood over and over again). Wallace Stegner is another; he and I have the same love for the West—not a love like some people have for a lifestyle or a climate—but a love like a tree has for the earth it is planted in.

My desire to be the writer Steve Martin’s friend was crushed somewhat when I found out he was a celebrity. It is one thing to be a famous writer, it is another to be a famous actor. The primary difference being that famous writers don’t have to worry about people hiding in their shrubbery.

I could write a letter to most writers, even Annie Dillard and say, “Hey, I like your work and I have this feeling we’d be friends. Want to come to tea? Maybe do a reading at XYZ?” But because he has to worry about the shrubbery people, the same letter to Steve might make me sound like a stalker. It would be much trickier to sound normal. And since I would be so worried about not sounding like a stalker, I would probably sound like one. I know because I have several creepy unfinished drafts. So I am thinking, along the same logic, that if I go for stalker, I might sound normal. Not sure this thinking is sound.

Also, I couldn’t invite him to a party, because who knows how other guests might act. Ack. I realize now that the only way to proceed is for him to take me into his inner circle of writing friends. But I am not sure how that is going to happen considering that I still haven’t sent any of these letters, and that he is apparently somewhat shy and off-put by people who think they already know him.

I did meet him once at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. He signed three of my books. I’m guessing he doesn’t remember me, despite the fact that I slipped him a note that said, “I love you.” (I had to think fast and I only had two square inches of paper to write on.) I think it was probably misinterpreted. Sigh. I promise I don’t have a suit that looks like a geranium bush.

A few years ago I saw a guy with a bumper sticker that said, “Steve Martin is a personal friend of mine.” I followed him for about 4 days (okay just 4 miles), trying to figure out if it was true or a joke. I realize now it was a joke--from one of Steve’s old comedy routines. But is it a joke Steve would carry far enough to give bumper stickers out to his friends? I’m guessing no. But there are a lot of things I have yet to learn about Steve, when we meet. If we ever meet. However, at this point, I won’t be devastated if we never meet so long as he keeps writing.

Although, I suppose I could do with what he has already give me. There are few books I read over and over, and it may surprise you that Steve Martin is on the same list as JD Salinger, Annie Dillard, Wallace Stegner, F.Scott Fitzgerald, and Rilke, but it makes perfect sense to me. All of these writers have a tender-hearted quality that is difficult to describe. It was in the way Fitzgerald describes Gatsby, the way Stegner makes mountains feel like holy temples, the way Holden describes his kid sister, Phoebe, in The Catcher in the Rye, and in Steve Martin’s poetic descriptions of his native Los Angeles in “Hissy Fit.”

I would love for readers share the books you over and over. And feel free to share any Steve Martin stalking stories. Steve if you are reading this, I had nothing to do with the recent banjo incident.

The winners are....

We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2010 Memoirs Ink Half-Yearly Writing Contest. Here they are:

First Place:
Hellhound
Melissa Febos

Second Place:
Dreamer
Nora Claypool

Third Place:
Do You Make Gravy?
Jennifer Blomgren

Honorable Mention:
Summer Waters
Julian Bentley- Edelman

You can read these and previous years winners and bios in our archives: here.

Please keep up the good writing and enter our next contest--the deadline for that contest, is August 14, and August 31, 2010. You can read the full guidelines and enter here.

Contest Update

We are supposed to announce the winners today. Maybe some of you out there entered our contest and are wondering why we haven't call you yet. It is because we haven't called anyone. The judges have narrowed it down to 6 or 7 and are at a total impasse. They asked me to read them. I read them. I laughed, I sighed, I nodded my head. But I refuse to have any part in judging this year. It is too hard. On one level, judging is easy, you ask yourself, "Is this a winner? or do I just wish it was?" But when you come down to top ten, they are all winners. But you have to chose 3. So then you have to start going through and analyzing each one based on a set of criteria that is partially established, but still all subjective. And you can't listen to those voices in your head, that are really the voices of disgruntled non-winners, that say things like: "I guess only women can win your contest" or "I guess only funny stories can win your contest," or "how many of your winners have been Canadian?"

The truth is, I don't know and I don't care. I want to pick the best, and most well-written stories. But judges tastes and methods vary wildly. When I have been a judge in the past, this is what I remember doing. I read the top stories probably 10 times each. I read them aloud to people I knew. I dreamt about them. I agonized. Eventually, I would give up and in a moment of existentialism I would decide to throw them up in the air, or down the stairs, and note which one landed first. When I did this, I would look at the "winner" and then argue myself out of it. Then one day, I would just know, and never look back.

It will be interesting to see what the judges decide this year. I hope they don't take much longer or I'm sure my email will blow up. So be patient, writers. That call may be coming.

Writing Anywhere

I picked up our mail a few days ago and was happy to note that we are already be getting entries to our August Contest. What was more surprising, though was that one of the entries came from the California State Prison. Now, we have received entries from all over the world, but this is our first entry from prison. And why not? It would seem that one has a lot of time to read and write in there. Rilke once told a young poet this:

"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the poet there is not poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds--wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it...."

I haven't opened this piece of mail. That is Jill's job, because if I happen to be a judge of the upcoming contest, I can't know who any of the authors are.

Oh, but the curiosity is killing me.