I've been keeping things to myself.
It's been six months since anything got posted here, and I'm running out of time.
Maybe it was my sister's notebooks. Betty died in March. She had been in an "assisted living" facility -- one step shy of a nursing home -- for six years. She kept a journal all that time, writing in it whenever the spirit moved her, telling it whatever came to mind.
She wrote down things she remembered from when she was a little girl in Connecticut. She wrote about her teen-age days in northern New York, where the family moved after our father's business fell victim to the Great Depression.
She wrote about getting engaged to one of my brother's Annapolis classmates, accepting his sapphire class ring. And she wrote about breaking that engagement when that new ensign went off to war. "Unforgivable," she wrote.
But it wasn't unforgivable at all, as things turned out. She was only 18, and one can understand; she didn t know her own mind, as they say. Perhaps her rejected suitor understood, too. She wanted to return his ring, but he wouldn't take it back.Some 70 years later they were both back in her life -- the ring and the now-retired Navy captain.
There is much more to this particular story, but I am going to save it for another day. Right now, I just want to draw a little inspiration for myself by thinking of my sister Betty, still beautiful in her late 80s, alone with her memories in the little room that was her last earthly home.
Alone with her memories and with a pen and paper, too. She was not a blogger. She never worked a computer. She was never -- would never be -- at home in the digital world. Hers was the world of ink on paper, words penned with increasing difficulty as her eyesight failed.
I think of her now in her loneliness and pain, and I think if she could do it I can, too. I am more than a decade younger -- a different generation, actually --- and if I begin now and stick to my last with half the resolution she showed, perhaps God will grant me time to compile a memoir like hers that will interest my kids and grandkids, if no one else.
I hope so. Surely it won't hurt to try.
