Where did the clown hats go?

Colourful little cards with words on them on an old wood table.

I finished my grandmother’s memoirs just before her cancer got really bad.

We didn’t know she was sick when I started putting a tape recorder between us and asking her questions, but when the leather bound book arrived at the old family farmhouse, her hospital bed did too.

What I remember most about that book is how much she wanted the nurses to see it — all those stories of her kicking butt as a young gym teacher, a scrappy stock broker, a mom of five boys.

I knew they didn’t need to. Gran commanded respect in all of her iterations. But the version of herself that she drew with stories on those spring afternoons with the tape recorder was the one she loved best.

September always feels so sudden to me, a curtain dropping without warning, the sun sneaking out of the show before intermission. How is it almost fall? How is it 2022?

Watching her with that book though, let me understand something about time, and what words can do to it. She got to say things she wanted to say on those pages, and they became a kind of buoy, or portal, a way to bear the fading light.

I can tell you now, the hardest part of that project was starting it. The hardest sentence was, “Hey Gran, I was wondering if you’d like me to write your memoirs.” The hardest moment was clearing my throat before asking her a big question. It seemed like we’d only ever talked about small stuff.

In order to start, I had to lower the bar, and find a way that was a lot less… serious.

In her poem Loving, Jane Stembridge writes:

When we loved
we didn’t love right.

The mornings weren’t funny
and we lost too much sleep.

I wish we could do it all again.
with clown hats on.

Can we just do it now? Pull the clown hats on and say everything that needs saying? Can we take this season to tell everyone that we love what fabulous, rare and spectacular creatures they are, and how the world will be forever altered when their curtain falls? Can we lower the bar and make things that matter, over and over, without taking it all so seriously?

It is our birthright to write all the things we want the nurses to know, to paint ourselves in the best of the realest colours, to let our lives be as huge and heartbreaking and ultimately ridiculous as they always were.

We get to tell our stories in our own words.
We get to believe them, to say “This is who I was” or “This is who I am” or “This is who I am becoming.”

I don’t want this summer to be over, but I don’t have any say in that.

What I can do is to find the story in all these scattered memories, to write that story so that it becomes a touchstone, as the future keeps flying forward. To say “this was me in 2022” and to believe it.

Clown hat firmly in place,