Category Archives: Memories

Questions/Answers

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My daughter-in-law gave me the present of an online, personal-interview program in which every Monday for one year I get a question about my life. The questions range from those about childhood, to food preferences, to sports, to religious outlook….The list goes on.

These Monday-questions are meant to be a record for posterity, but I’ve discovered that although ostensibly simple, they hide in their midst a fruitful complexity valuable in my work as a writer.

Why?

Because each question is the lynchpin of a moment or episode. Considering the answer to each question, I am tied to the question itself, compelled to search my memory and understanding within its confines, to pay attention to detail, and to search for whatever deeper meaning exists.

Coming up with answers to the questions is like swimming in a pool rather than in the ocean. I can swim lengthwise, crosswise, or diagonally, but whichever way I swim, there is a boundary. If I step from the pool, I’m no longer in it! If I step outside the question, I am no longer responding to it. Thus, each question compels me to focus. And, as I explore the area inside the boundary, the seemingly simplicity of the question becomes paradoxically complex, vast.

Example: Who did you date in high school?

I could, if I wanted, simply list names — but the question is more evocative than that.

My mind looks back at that young high school girl standing in front of the mirror combing her hair, heart pounding with anticipation. She worries about the pimple on her cheek and is more excited about being on a date and going somewhere than about the boy. I suddenly realize that girl never dated a classmate: she has known her classmates since kindergarten; they are too much like brothers to date. So who did I date? And then I wonder, Where did I go on dates? And I see my girl-self hating every moment of a particular amusement-park date; I see her embarrassed by the rides and the screaming. I see her wishing she were home.

Thus, at the same time I’m exploring that teenager’s life, I’m understanding, by answers, aspects of that girl’s character I never thought of before. Why did she hate amusement parks? What else didn’t she like? What struggles was she having? What was the usual date for teenagers in my town? Have I fabricated things about my younger life? Have I even lied about things? Or exaggerated events to make myself look better? Was that girl straightforward? A good student? What sort of date did she prefer? What were the boys like then?

The question snowballs, the pool expands. I swim into water I’ve never considered. My daughter-in-law’s gift leads me to vet not only aspects of my own life, it reminds me, in the long arc of a novel, to explore my characters’ lives from seemingly mundane details. It compels me to consider if I asking the right questions about my fictional characters. Could I dive deeper into their foibles, reflect on the ‘simpler’ facets of their lives ?

Thus, plunging into these Monday-questions becomes not only a gift to my family, it renews my attention to the details of my work, and — fictional or flesh – it is the details that make the design.

Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan

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The fall of Kabul and final takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

I’ve been watching the news day by day, remembering the good people and quick-witted students I knew when I lived and taught in Afghanistan years ago. I think of the young women, my bright-faced students, curious, eager for education, so ready to learn and to be a part of what was then, a country with possibilities for both women and men.

The young Afghan women of today, unlike the young women I taught and unlike the
women of the last 20 years, are now scrambling to find a way to safety, a way to escape being forced brides of Taliban fighters, a way to hide the fact that they are journalists or fashion designers, a way to protect the businesses they worked so hard to build. All Afghan women today see their freedom fading: freedom to simply walk in the street on an errand without a chadri or escort, freedom to study, freedom to have a say in who they marry, to express themselves openly… The list goes on.

I don’t have a Pollyanna memory of the year and a half I lived in Afghanistan. There
were terrible problems, terrible injustices (as in every country) but there was also social action, education for girls and boys, and the freedom to be citizens of the 20th century. And I haven’t forgotten that the Taliban takeover will be difficult and dangerous for many Afghan men as well, especially for any Afghan still in country who worked with the U.S. and its allies.

I’m thinking too of the U.S. and allied families that have experienced the death of their
children thousands of miles from home. All families: U.S., Allied, and Afghan, that have lost children have undergone one of the hardest losses possible — add to that the grief of those families whose children came home alive but mangled and broken, never the same.  Are they feeling their children died or were injured in vain? Will they eat bitterness the rest of their lives?

What a travesty of friendship on the part of the West this too hasty and ill-planned
withdrawal has been. Bitterness and grief floods the blood stream. Maybe we had to leave; but it’s the way we left and it’s our government’s naïveté about the Taliban (to put the decision in the best light).

Circumstances: memories of the Afghan women and men, those good people I once
knew, and my personal knowledge of losing a child juxtapose in the anguish of what humans can do to each other.

Joseph Campbell once said, “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters
the flowering of humanity in this contemporary life and dedicate ourselves to that.”

It feels like we’re searching for those possibilities in a darkening room.