Write your Life Memoirs
RIVER BENDER - April 2012
Many years ago when computers and word processing first became available I got the idea of writing a story of my life. The idea came as I was looking over old photos and attempting to sort them out by years so they could be posted in an album. What a job. It's too bad all photos don't have dates. They brought back memories and I began to wonder if it might be possible to create a story of my life with what happened every year. The purpose of this article is to discuss the steps I took to finally complete my memoirs covering 82 years.
I didn't have a hardscrabble life and my parents weren't eccentric to make an interesting story. I didn't do any skydiving or set any records but I'm convinced that everyone probably has something amusing or funny to say about their past. For example, the earliest story my parents told which embarrassed me was how at age four I urinated on grandpa's rooster and got pecked you know where. Also, at age sixteen I had a pilot's license without my parent's knowledge and almost crashed into a night club. As I look back I discovered I didn't have a boring life and with a little research, especially with help from Google on dates, I was able to create a chronological accounting of my life.
Documenting memoirs would be difficult if not impossible without a word processor. I first created a list of years as if each would be a chapter in a book. Next I looked at old photos and jotted down brief notes in the processor of what happened in a given year. For example, in 1934 at age 5 "we moved from Arkansas to North Carolina in an old Buick with a canvas top that leaked." As the years went by and snippets of events accumulated in each year I would go back and weave them into a coherent story. Lots of cut and pasting was necessary to move comments to the correct year. Along the way spelling and sentence syntax was checked by my word processor.
It wasn't easy but my story was finally finished with a write-up entered for every year of my life, some short in early years but longer in later years. We found that we use it now occasionally to search when a certain event occurred, a real plus for it being in a computer. The document so far has 165 pages and I'm working on phase II which is to embed photos. This is no easy task because it involves scanning the photos, adding captions and embedding them to correlate with wraparound text. It's a slow process and so far I've added only about 60 photos. What next? I'll eventually put it online for family members to edit and then perhaps I'll think about publishing a book. I'm 82 so time is running out.
All past articles since 1998 are posted at http://pages.suddenlink.net/davew/dwindex.htm