Personal essays
On creating little reminders, feelings, and memories
Reminders
I visited someone recently who has been having memory issues and there was a note next to their bed.
I didn’t want to be intrusive but I couldn’t help looking at it.
Someone had written in beautiful long hand, “You are in” and then told the person where they were currently located.
The note outlined their day ahead including my visit.
I was able to point to it at various moments during my visit when a question came up and tell them that physical therapy would be at this time and someone’s visit would be at that time.
I don’t know how effective that method of communication was, but it was a gesture of kindness that also cued those visiting that the person we were there to see might need these reminders.
Writing
I spent much of the weekend with a friend I see now and then. We both had some time between commitments so he decided to join me in Marlow.
He’s recently sent his eldest son off to college and we talked about a note he’d written to him.
I did something similar.
After Kim and I dropped Maggie off at college we spent a weekend in a nice Bed and Breakfast and thought about our new life of empty nesting.
For us it was a complicated time because this shouldn’t have been the beginning of “just us”. There should have been another three years. We spent the right amount of time mourning this aspect and then returned to celebrating Maggie’s success and future.
We stopped at a little shop and I got a card and wrote to Maggie about how proud we were about what she had accomplished and there was no pressure on her - she should just get everything she could out of the college experience and enjoy herself.
I don’t know if the note was for her or for us, but we stopped by the post office, bought a stamp, and mailed it off.
I do know that, if she kept it, the note was for her then and for her later.
Rediscovering
As I clean out my house I find notes that I wrote or received over the years and flash back to those times.
We don’t have those moments with email or messages. At least I don’t.
I kept journals that I occasionally thumb through. I close them with the embarassment of reading through a twenty year old’s private thoughts. Was that even me?
Thank goodness that’s not me any more. Except for the aches and pains, I love being the age I am.
My Marlow friend talked about something his wife had given him when they were dating. It wasn’t a note, but it was a message. He’s been thinking about it again and, with the distance and added wisdom, reconsidering what it means.
Sometimes a note comes to mean something that it didn’t when it was written.
Perhaps a note means something different as the context and situation changes.
It makes us wonder if the writer knew that or if we need to put ourselves back in their shoes at the time they sat down to write it.
When my mom gave me advice after I graduated from college, she wasn’t yet fifty. I now look at someone turning fifty and think, “oh, they are so young.”
Do moms exist anymore who leave notes in lunch bags?
I’ve been writing more of those sort of short, positive notes to others. I often do it with email or messages and I know it’s not the same. I try to write a note by hand now and then.
I’ve been thinking about leaving myself a note now and then. One that I won’t find until I need it. One that I will read and not quite remember writing.
One that tells me where I am - not literally but in a way that brings me back to who I need to be.
One that reminds me what I will do today to be the best I can be.
A simple note to self.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 338. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe