Unforgettable: Short Stories by Paulette Alden

Author:Paulette Alden [Alden, Paulette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Radiator Press
Published: 2014-02-10T05:00:00+00:00

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Miriam decides to teach a memoir course at Wedgwood Manor. The course will be a place where her mother can meet other people in the building, have “something to do,” make friends. Besides, it might be fun. Miriam figures she might learn about her mother’s background. How she wishes her mother would write about her childhood, her girlhood, her parents, her grandparents. All the things they never get very far in talking about.

But her mother is too dizzy to go to the first meeting. And indeed, she never attends a single one of the sessions, always making an excuse or simply refusing, putting her foot down, as she is prone to do. At first Miriam is irked. She feels like a captive audience for the six old women in the course, who don’t, it turns out, really want to write so much as they want to talk. To tell. They tell endlessly about their pasts, and Miriam feels bored and aggravated that she has to sit there and listen. But gradually she relaxes and lets go of her own expectations for the course. So what if they can only write a little, a paragraph or a page a week, or nothing at all? It is fun to hear their stories, as Miriam gets to know them. It’s good for them to tell. So they aren’t going to be writers; they still want to pass on some of their pasts to their children, grandchildren, and other relatives. Miriam gives them assignments, suggestions: Write about the house where you grew up; describe a grandparent. One day she is struck that they all say, spontaneously, that they miss their mothers. They’re seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five years old, and they miss their mothers. Miriam is both surprised and not surprised. Their mothers live on, vividly, in their memories. They tell little details about their mothers. Six floors up, Miriam’s own mother dozes in her La-Z-Boy rocker.

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