Many people, even those who live rather ordinary lives, are tempted to write their memoirs.  I have, until now, resisted that temptation.  However, at a reunion of my wife's family in summer 2003, the four siblings and three in-laws began telling stories from the past, and we resolved that we should write down some of our recollections.  The grown children who were present at that reunion (the next generation) agreed.  Despite pictures and now videos and DVDs, which capture the image of an experience, only words preserve the quality of our experiences, what they meant to us in all their nuances.

As the last to enter the family by way of marriage to the youngest sibling, I felt that my memories would have the smallest commonality with the rest of the group.  Even the other in-laws had much longer track records than I did as part of the family, and, in a number of ways, my most significant memories were markedly different.

But another force came into play.  Our daughter, who has become interested in genealogy, was urging me to write my memories.  She was prompted to this view by our discovery, after my mother's death, of a journal that my mother had kept.  Our daughter transcribed the journal, scanned in pictures from old family albums, and put it together in a book that she distributed to most known survivors – my nieces and nephews (her cousins), my brother's widow, and so on.  She asked me to edit it, and, when I did, I became aware of experiences my mother had that I never knew about and of a side of her personality of which I was completely unaware.  I also realized that there is something to be said for passing on, in some permanent form, what we recall of our inner and outer lives to our children and grandchildren.

I decided not to attempt a chronological approach.  My memoirs are a restrospect that is seen in fragments, much as my own memory works.  When I reach mentally into the past, I do not travel a chronological path.  Events separated by many years connect to each other by subtle links.  Of course, presented in this way, the picture is tremendously confusing to anyone but me.  So I have decided to give each fragment – each episode, if you will – a unifying theme.  Each is, in fact, a self-contained essay.  That way too I can hope to give the experiences a wider reach, beyond what is of interest to my immediate family.   For example, my essay about the "joy of writing" may perhaps say something to young writers or to the parents of young writers, while at the same time describing a bit of my life and what it was like at that time.

I have learned that, if one is going to write about oneself and still be interesting to others, one must step outside oneself and give the reader a broader picture.  That is my goal here, but, as the saying goes, this is a "work in progress."  As I have had to let my own life change course far from the path I anticipated, I must let my mind retrace this road as it sees fit.

10 Aug 2005	Addiction, Recovery, and Beyond - Part 1 In the first of three articles about alcoholism, I describe the beginning of addiction and the progression of the disease.
9 Aug 2005	Addiction, Recovery, and Beyond - Part 2 In the second of three articles about alcoholism, I describe the process of recovery.
8 Aug 2005	Addiction, Recovery, and Beyond - Part 3 In the third and last of three articles on alcoholism, subtitled "Beyond Recovery," I describe the incredible and unexpected rewards of living sober.
20 Jul 2005	Childhood Half-Remembered Recollections of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa.
20 Jul 2004	Years of Discipline and Discovery An account of my boyhood education at Rondebosch Preparatory School in South Africa.
17 May 2004	Discovering the Joy of Writing At an early age, I serendipitously find what is to become my life's dominant avocation.