At a writing conference workshop on developing the personal essay, Suzan Huney read the draft of an essay spawned by thumbing through her address book.  Her musings on the people she found in her book led to memories of her grandmother’s address book and then to consulting it directly. As she continued her drafting process, her writing took an unexpected direction and with revisions, she found a way to fully voice what is in her heart concerning a close family member.

Following is the draft Suzan read at the workshop.  As you read, note the places that words and phrases strike you, the places you have feelings that get in the way of staying with the essay (confusion, disappointment, distraction, etc.) and places where you would like to know more than the author has included:

Choice Bits

Lenny Anderson is the first name in my address book and the first name on my Christmas card list each year.  In her Christmas card to me last year, Lenny wrote, “Is Judy still fat?”

 She of all people to ask!  Jeans and over-sized flannel shirts covered Lenny’s stout, hard built frame all the years of my growing up.  She cut her own hair and it was blocky, short, and always in disarray.  Lenny was only four years older than I, but my parents trusted her with their car, and it was she who drove us to the local movie theatre and to football games.  Mom didn’t know that Lenny kept a stash of books that she would never have approved of under her mattress, The Catcher in the Rye and Lady Chatterley’s Lover among them.

I last saw Lenny five years ago.  She called me one Saturday afternoon and said she was going out for a drive and would stop by.  Click.  She didn’t wait for my reply.  Thirty minutes later, Lenny lumbered up to the porch, tilted her head back and forth like a kewpie doll and asked, “Is Judy still fat?”  She was referring to our last brief visit a few years before when I had shown her family pictures.  My sister Judy was a skinny youngster, but she’d spread out in middle age.

“Hey, Lenny,” I opened as she plopped down on a porch chair, “Do you remember all those Parcheesi and Monopoly games?  Remember how mad Judy got when I cheated?”  Lenny’s penetrating blue eyes seemed to see us sprawled out on the floor, stacks of play money and property deeds hoarded in front of the board.  But instead of joining in the memory, Lenny blurted, “I have schizophrenia.  The medicine I take works real swell.”  Twenty minutes later, she roared off in the ’52 Dodge she inherited from her mother.

I continue thumbing the pages of my address book, adding names to my Christmas list. In the G section, Grandma Cooper’s last address, the Winslow Convalescent Home, is copied into my address book from ten years ago even though she died in 1979.  I could not leave her name behind when my old address book fell apart.

H.  My good friend Pat Hardisty has been dead for four years now but her address and phone number are there on the page as though inviting a conversation.

Pauline Holmes, also dead.  Pauline lived five houses from me, but she loved mail and in return for my cards sent by post, she left surprises in my mailbox – a cookie wrapped in foil, a book to read, even a spring flower. I’ll never cross out Pauline’s name.  The very act of obliterating her name would seem too final.

H is full and slops over into I, which is ok because I don’t know anyone with an I name.

I flip the J page.  My cousin Rusty is soloing this year.  His partner Emily moved out a couple of weeks ago.  I liked Emily.  I’ll wait and see if they mend their troubled relationship before I mail Rusty’s Christmas card.

The K’s are a problem.  My sister, Judy Kutz, and her husband Jim’s address changed in October when they moved to an 850 square foot over-the-garage apartment Jim built in Arlington.  He is building a house for them, but it will be awhile before it is finished.  Their temporary address plus the addresses of their five grown children crowd the K slots just as we crowded their old home the last 12 Christmases.

The house was big enough for overnight guests on Christmas Eve, and Judy’s antique oak table, with Jim’s plywood extender, accommodated 14.  Their family room was a perfect place to send the kids to play games or Grandpa for a nap.  This year, I’m coping with the prospect of Christmas at my house, even though Jim is allergic to cats and I have four.  Our meals will be cafeteria style, with plates balanced on lap.

I live in our childhood home, so I think about the nostalgic side of crowding into the living room that used to seem big.  Judy and I will argue over who gets which stocking hook on the fireplace mantel, and maybe Mom will fix Grandma’s red and green-layered Jell-O salad.

K also includes my mother-in-law’s address, next to which I’ve noted the date of her death, 12/21/96.  I miss fixing a box of Christmas goodies for Adeline.  She liked clean romances in big print from the Christian book store, cross word puzzles, and candy, no caramels or nuts, packaged in individual cellophane bags tied with red ribbons.

No change.

M.  My husband’s sister is my only M.  Still alive, hasn’t moved, same husband.

Allan Schneider, dead.

Ronald and Corrie van Wijk, divorced.

I close my address book, but instead of working on my Christmas cards as planned I get out my inheritance from Grandma Cooper: her address book.  It is a 5 1/2 inch by 4 inch pink notebook, and inscribed inside the cover is “Given me by Suzie, Christmas 1960.” Grandma gave her address book back to me in 1978, the year before she died.

The pages are aged a subtle yellow.  The majority of addresses are crossed out with large, bold X’s.  That’s what happens when you live to be 94, lots of X’s.

Grandma didn’t bother with alphabetizing and names appear randomly O, W, C, L, and B.  Some names, like Harold and Flossie and Oscar and Elvira, are nearly obscured by heavy X’s.  There are addresses with no zip codes, and phone numbers like GR2-5228.  Recorded in the back of Grandma’s address book, in script so small I almost need a magnifying glass to read, are poems, Bible scripture, and Grandma’s Choice Bits.

I heard her voice as I read out loud.

I worry I putter I push and shove Hunting little molehills To make mountains of.

Grandma kept track of old friends from North Dakota where she and Grandpa lived until their retirement from farming, and then their move out west.  She stayed in contact with grandsons with military FBO addresses, and her many relatives scattered like Johnny’s apple seeds.  Her letters often included a Choice Bit.

Carol Irwin’s address is sprinkled throughout Grandma’s address book, crossed out only to appear again in a few pages.  Carol was one of Grandma’s dearest grandchildren, a special child born spastic.  Her hands shook so that she drank with a straw, and learned to type at a young age on a Royal manual typewriter the family chipped in to buy for her.  Unfortunately Carol hooked up with a no good and had four babies she couldn’t take care of.  Carol and her no good moved from Seattle to Portland to St. Louis, back to Portland, then Seattle, finally ending up in a car at no address.  She died an alcoholic.

Rusty appears almost as often as Carol: Haight Ashbury to the Colorado mountains where he lived in a teepee.

Judy, General Delivery, Dededo Station, Agana, Guam.  She taught school on Guam for two years.  Arlington, where she lives now, seems almost as far away.

And there is my first address in Seattle, 1970, Mrs. J.C. Oreiro.  That’s an address that should have been crossed out thirty years ago when we divorced.  It’s written next to Lenny Anderson’s Seattle address.  Grandma called her Lenore.  Lenny wasn’t mentally ill then, only odd in her blocky hair and mannish clothes.  Grandma held Lenny up as an example, fond of telling me, “Lenny is such a polite girl.  She always says thank you.”

It is obvious when Grandma’s beautiful penmanship changed after she lost her right arm to cancer.  A Choice Bit, written in an awkward, left-hand scrawl seems so appropriate for the hard time she was going through.

Veiled in the future before us, Life’s precious pathway we drink. God, in His wisdom revealing, Only one step at a time.

I sighed, closed Grandma’s address book, and put it back in my desk drawer.  Next year I’ll take it out again and ponder the ebb and flow of life. But next year, in my own address book I will find at the end, written in my neatness script, the words of Grandma’s Choice Bit.

His thots were slow, His words were few And never formed to glisten. But he was joy to all his friends, You should have heard him listen.

I picked up my pen and wrote on Lenny’s card, “Judy is not fat.”

In class, I told Suzan that she had a big essay on her hands. It seemed to me that the essay wanted to examine something concerning her sister and I believed it might be something very difficult for Suzan to talk about–hence the working up to it by looking at so many names in the address book and meditating on loss and change.  I felt this because the essay opens with the question about Judy being fat and ends with a defense of Judy, but we don’t really know why this defense is necessary.  I believed it to be a defense that Suzan the author was making to keep some fears about Judy at bay, as if denying something would halt it or make it go away.  Suzan said the analysis was astute and accurate.  She emailed me the draft she had read and I emailed her more specific responses telling her where I wanted to know more.

Lenny stays for 20 minutes before she roars off. We find out about her schizophrenia and her relentless question about Judy’s weight, but we don’t know what transpires in those twenty minutes.  What occurred during that visit would help ground the reader in Suzan’s present and would probably also set up a platform from which Suzan could write more about Judy.

Later Suzan says:

Pauline Holmes, also dead.  Pauline lived five houses from me, but she loved mail and in return for my cards sent by post, she left surprises in my mailbox – a cookie wrapped in foil, a book to read, even a spring flower. I’ll never cross out Pauline’s name.  The very act of obliterating her name would seem too final.

I wanted to know more here–what would crossing out her name erase?  The answer is there, of course, in the subtext of what Suzan remembers fondly, but a little more information would keep us as well as Suzan in Suzan’s inner world.  Seeing a list of the dead and rebelling against it means Suzan does not want to accept other future losses.  Something she adds here will help her writing arrive at that insight later.

Then Suzan writes:

Grandma kept track of old friends from North Dakota where she and Grandpa lived until their retirement from farming and then their move out west.  She stayed in contact with grandsons with military FBO addresses, and her many relatives scattered like Johnny’s apple seeds.  Her letters often included a Choice Bit.

I think repeating another of Grandma’s Choice Bits would help grow the essay. I am curious to know more of them and which she put in letters.

Ultimately Suzan writes:

Judy, General Delivery, Dededo Station, Agana, Guam.  She taught school on Guam for two years.  Arlington, where she lives now, seems almost as far away.

Again, I wanted to know why the connection to Judy is important to the author, what she has with this sister, what she misses, what she remembers.  I think Judy is central to the essay and so I want to see her and the sister relationship.  Lenny drove them all over as youngsters, but it was who they were together in the car and whatever they forged together than Suzan fears losing is what this essay is about. A way for Suzan to write herself to this insight might be through revealing what she remembers they said about Lenny when they were little.  It might mean writing directly about how having Judy in her life helps her ameliorate losses and difficulties.

When I read the ending, “I picked up my pen and wrote on Lenny’s card, ‘Judy is not fat.’”  I felt so disappointed.  I wanted to know why Judy needed her sister to defend her or why Suzan felt she had to. What is behind that flourish of the pen on the card?

I am asking a lot of Suzan at the end. Since Suzan had divulged after the workshop that her sister had been diagnosed with an illness, I believed this essay had to face a most difficult possibility for Suzan: envisioning difficulties her sister might face. Next, it would have to return to the now where things are okay–like some Choice Bits advice.  In that way, the build up of all the people whose lives are over or whose lives have taken unintended and difficult directions would lead to the build up of emotions for Suzan concerning Judy, someone she would miss way more than those already gone.  It seemed to me that Lenny’s medicine would provide the springboard in the essay for Suzan to think of a medicine for her own emotional difficulty in absorbing Judy’s diagnosis. I was thinking that this might be the case because of all the memories Suzan could have elaborated about Lenny, she chose the day Lenny tells her she is schizophrenic and takes medicine that “works real swell.”  Right after she closes that memory with Lenny’s own words, Suzan is back to looking at names in the address book.  We have not yet gotten any reaction from her on Lenny’s situation. Since I know that the opening of an essay sets up something that the ending will return to, I can wait a bit for Suzan’s reaction but it better be included by the essay’s end if I am to feel completely satisfied as a reader. As a teacher, I began thinking of ways she might return to the medicine. Thinking about needing to take some good advice concerning her situation with Judy made me think that the medicine set up would help her speak about her situation. I wondered if Suzan had responded to Lenny’s announcement about medication. Perhaps her own words to Lenny might resonate with her now as she wrote.

I knew developing this essay further would be tremendously difficult emotionally, and I hoped Suzan would continue writing her essay, as it would not only be a beautiful essay, but writing it would also ultimately help her live in the now she was after, not the future that the idea of writing her yearly Christmas cards and seeing how her list changes makes her think about.  I told her to take her time, to write after taking some deep breaths and to cry if tears came.  I loved what she was doing on the page.

I suggested that she give some details on the disease itself and the course it might take and what helping Judy and watching her deal with things might ask of Suzan.  Writing this part might help Suzan find her way to an attitude of taking one-step-at-a-time and maintaining the thinking that there is no need to make mountains, as a Choice Bit advises. Perhaps she could reveal what “medicine” (a Choice Bit?) she might give herself daily to keep a healthy outlook about her sister. In addition, I felt that giving images and details throughout the essay from time spent with Judy in the past and in the present would also help Suzan segue into the card writing and I believed she’d find something different to write on Lenny’s card. Lenny is the device Suzan the writer is using to come to an emotional epiphany about Judy. Just like Lenny does what it takes to keep herself going, if our writer lets herself mention what she is afraid of–losing Judy or not being there with enough courage maybe–the essay will find a way to assure its writer that, like Lenny, she has what it takes.

After a few more drafts, Suzan completed this version of the essay:

Choice Bits Suzan Huney

Lenny Anderson is the first name in my address book and the first name on my Christmas card list each year.  In her Christmas card to me last year, Lenny wrote, “Is Judy still fat?”

She of all people to ask!  Jeans and over-sized flannel shirts covered Lenny’s stout, hard built frame all the years of my growing up.  She cut her own hair and it was blocky, short, and always in disarray.  Lenny was only four years older than I, but my parents trusted her with their car, and it was she who drove my sister Judy and me to the local movie theatre and to football games.  Mom didn’t know that Lenny kept a stash of books that she would never have approved of under her mattress, The Catcher in the Rye and Lady Chatterley’s Lover among them.

I last saw Lenny two years ago.  She called me one Saturday afternoon and said she was going out for a drive and would stop by.  Click.  She didn’t wait for my reply.  Thirty minutes later, Lenny lumbered up to the porch, tilted her head back and forth like a kewpie doll and she asked her question then, too: “Is Judy still fat?”  Then, she was referring to our last brief visit a few years before when I had shown her family pictures. Judy was a skinny youngster, but she’d spread out in middle age.

“Hey, Lenny,” I opened with my own question as she plopped down on a porch chair, “Do you remember all those Parcheesi and Monopoly games?  Remember how mad Judy got when I cheated?” From previous visits I knew it was impossible to have a normal conversation with Lenny.  What forms our friendship today is the memory of swimming in the cold water of Puget Sound and evening games like kick-the-can.

Lenny’s penetrating blue eyes seemed to see us sprawled out on the floor, stacks of play money and property deeds hoarded in front of the board.  But instead of joining in the memory, Lenny blurted, “I have schizophrenia.  The medicine I take works real swell.”

“Do you take your medicine every day?  I thought of my cousin who is schizophrenic and know how important it is for him to stay on his medicine.

“Oh yes I do and it works swell. How are your parents?”

I told her about their recent trip to Arizona.  She listened intently, nodding her head as though in agreement.  I told her what I knew about Sandra and the other kids from our neighborhood.  She asked for Judy’s phone number, and said she wanted to call her.  Lenny never stays long and this time was no different than before.  Twenty minutes after her arrival she roared off in the ’52 Dodge she inherited from her mother.

I continue thumbing the pages of my address book, adding names to my Christmas list. In the G section Grandma Cooper’s last address, the Winslow Convalescent Home, remains in my address book even though she died in 1979.  I could not leave her name behind when my old address book fell apart.

H.  My good friend Pat Hardisty has been dead for four years now but her address and phone number are there on the page as though inviting a conversation.

Pauline Holmes, also dead.  I’ll never cross out Pauline’s name.  The very act of obliterating her name would seem too final, as though death took her from me.  I like to see her name and it brings her alive as my mind wanders to the many little encounters that formed the mosaic of our friendship.  Pauline lived five houses from me, but she loved mail and in return for my cards sent by post, she left surprises in my mailbox – a cookie wrapped in foil, a book to read, even a spring flower.  And it was at the mailbox that I often joined Pauline and her dog Bailey for an evening walk.

H is full and slops over into I, which is ok because I don’t know anyone with an I name.

I flip the J page.  My cousin Rusty is soloing this year.  His partner Emily moved out a couple of weeks ago.  I liked Emily.

The K’s are a problem.  My sister, Judy, and her husband Jim Kutz’s address changed in October when they moved to an 850 square foot over-the-garage apartment Jim built in Arlington, a two-hour drive north of Seattle.  He is building a house for them next to the garage, but it will be awhile before it is finished.  Their new address plus the addresses of their five grown children crowd the K slots just as we crowded their old home the last 12 Christmases.

The house was big enough for overnight guests on Christmas Eve, and Judy’s antique oak table, with Jim’s plywood extender, accommodated 14.  Their family room was a perfect place to send the kids to play games or Grandpa for a nap.  This year, I’m coping with the prospect of Christmas at my house, even though Jim is allergic to cats and I have four.  Our meals will be cafeteria style, with plates balanced on our laps.

I live in our childhood home.  When we were little, Judy and I shared the bedroom where I now sleep with my husband.  Many a time my nightmares drove me into Judy’s bed and the security of her warm body.

I think about the nostalgic side of crowding into the living room that used to seem big. It is easy to recall two girls in red-striped flannel nighties sneaking into the living room for an early morning peak at Santa’s gifts.  Judy and I will argue over who gets which stocking hook on the fireplace mantel, and maybe Mom will fix Grandma’s red and green-layered Jell-O salad.

K also includes my mother-in-law’s address, next to which I’ve noted the date of her death, 12/21/96.  I miss fixing a box of Christmas goodies for Adeline.  She liked clean romances in big print from the Christian book store, cross word puzzles, and candy, no caramels or nuts, packaged in individual cellophane bags tied with red ribbons.

L. No change.

My husband’s sister is my only M.  Still alive, hasn’t moved, same husband.

Allan Schneider, dead.

Ronald and Corrie van Wijk, divorced.

I close my address book, but instead of working on my Christmas cards as planned I get out my inheritance from Grandma Cooper: her address book.  It is a 5 1/2 inch by 4 inch pink notebook, and inscribed inside the cover is “Given me by Suzie, Christmas 1960.”

The pages are aged a subtle yellow.  The majority of addresses are crossed out with large, bold X’s.  That’s what happens when you live to be 94, lots of X’s.

Grandma didn’t bother with alphabetizing and names appear randomly O, W, C, L, and B.  Some names, like Harold and Flossie and Oscar and Elvira, are nearly obscured by heavy X’s.  There are addresses with no zip codes, and phone numbers like GR2-5228.  Recorded in the back of Grandma’s address book, in script so small I almost need a magnifying glass to read, are poems, Bible scripture, and Grandma’s Choice Bits.

I heard her voice as I read out loud.

I worry I putter I push and shove Hunting little molehills To make mountains of.

Grandma kept track of old friends from North Dakota where she and Grandpa lived until their retirement from farming, and then their move out west.  She stayed in contact with grandsons with military FBO addresses, and her many relatives scattered like Johnny’s apple seeds.  Her letters often included a Choice Bit like this one that Grandma sent to me when I was away at college.

Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Promise yourself to think only of the best, to work only for the best and expect only the best. Promise yourself to forget the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements of the future.

Carol Irwin’s address is sprinkled throughout Grandma’s address book, crossed out only to appear again in a few pages.  Carol was one of Grandma’s dearest grandchildren, a special child born with cerebral palsy.  Her hands shook so much that she drank with a straw, and learned to type at a young age on a Royal manual typewriter the family chipped in to buy for her.  Unfortunately Carol hooked up with a no good and had three babies she couldn’t take care of.  Carol and her no good moved from Seattle to Portland to St. Louis, back to Portland, then Seattle, finally ending up in a car at no address.  She died an alcoholic.

Grandson Rusty appears almost as often as Carol: Haight Ashbury to the Colorado mountains where he lived in a teepee.

Judy, General Delivery, Dededo Station, Agana, Guam.  She taught school on Guam for two years.  We were proud of her for going off on such a big adventure, but it was hard to let her go.  We missed her, especially that first Christmas.  It was prohibitively expensive to call on the phone, and email didn’t exist.  We wrote letters and recorded our news on cassette tapes.  Not long ago Mom found one of the tapes tucked away in the back of a drawer.  Grandma Cooper’s one-sided conversation tells the family news as though she were sitting at Judy’s table on Guam sharing a pot of tea.

Arlington, where she lives now, seems almost as far away as Guam.  A ferry ride from Bainbridge Island and then a two-hour drive means getting together is an all-day excursion.  I liked it better when I could meet her for dinner after work, or spend Friday night at her house so we could hang out together on Saturday.  Now in her little apartment there is no bed for me.

Judy is the one person who knows me, and she loves me in spite of my quirks and shortcomings.  She listens to all that is in my heart, without judgement.  She is the one who put her arm around me when I sobbed at Grandma Cooper’s memorial service.  She is the one I called when I knew my first marriage was ending. But more than being there in times of stress and doubt, Judy’s honest assessment that “Your butt looks too big in those pants,” or “You need more color in your life,” as she snatches a black dress from my hands makes her the truest of friends. I know something strong binds us together as surely as I know that spring will follow the cold months of winter.

I turn the page in Grandma’s pink notebook.  Mrs. J.C. Oreiro, my first address in Seattle, 1970.  That’s an address that should have been crossed out twenty-six years ago when I divorced.  It’s written next to Lenny Anderson’s Seattle address.  Grandma called her Lenore.  Lenny wasn’t mentally ill then, only odd in her blocky hair and mannish clothes.  Grandma held Lenny up as an example, fond of telling me, “Lenny is such a polite girl.  She always says thank you.”

It is obvious when Grandma’s beautiful penmanship changed after she lost her right arm to cancer.  A Choice Bit, written in an awkward, left-hand scrawl seems so appropriate for the hard time she was going through.

Veiled in the future before us, Life’s precious pathway we drink. God, in His wisdom revealing, Only one step at a time.

I sigh, close Grandma’s address book, and put it back in my desk drawer.  Next year I’ll take it out again and ponder the ebb and flow of life. But next year, in my own address book, I will also find at the end, written in my neatness script, the words of Grandma’s Choice Bit.

His thoughts were slow, His words were few And never formed to glisten. But he was joy to all his friends, You should have heard him listen.

Judy was back from Guam in time to hold me up during a difficult divorce in 1976.  And she continued to be there to help me raise my daughter (and love her as much as I), during the six years I was a single mom. When she came home from Guam, she was covered with thousands of reddish freckles that never faded, even in winter.  We thought she had developed an allergy to the sun.  Twenty-eight years later, we know she has mastocytosis, a rare life-compromising, life-threatening disease.  Her body produces huge levels of histamines that cause an abnormal accumulation of mast cells to form in her skin.  The freckles on her insides are what worry me.  These mast cells could accumulate in her liver, spleen and lymph nodes.

I pick up my pen and begin to write Lenny’s card, first as always.  I can’t find a holiday greeting I want to write.  “Judy is not fat,” I write through tears.  There is no medicine that will work real well for Judy.  I know that last month she came to my first reading at a local bookstore even though I told her it was ok if she didn’t want to make the long trip to Bainbridge just to see me read for seven minutes.  But she knew how much I wanted her there.  When I paused and looked out at the audience it was Judy that I saw.  Judy’s smile seemed to wink and it spoke pride.  Her presence there in the front row calmed me and gave me courage as it had many times before.  Judy’s gentle touch, her reassuring words, have always conveyed a confidence that I am a good mother, that I would survive the divorce, that I was smart enough to go to college, and now that I am a wonderful writer.  After my reading she told me that she had brought a camera, but since she didn’t want to miss a single word or expression on my face, she never took the camera out of her purse.  These words are better than any picture I could put in an album.

 

Whatever course her mastocytosis takes, I am here to support Judy, to give her courage, right now, this minute. I cherish each phone call, every email.  I celebrate each time my best friend sister and I are together, whether I am helping her move, planting spring daffodils with her or shopping on a Saturday morning.  I see Judy in the Bon Marche dressing room, modeling a long jean skirt and a blue sweater that matches her blue eyes.  Her reflection in the mirror, all curvy and full, is the image of glowing health.

When I write on Lenny’s card, I am thinking about the daily medicine Lenny takes to stay healthy.  It dawns on me that the medicine I take everyday to keep myself grounded came from Grandma years ago in one of her Choice Bits:  Promise yourself to think only of the best, to work only for the best and expect only the best. I will and I write, “Keep taking your medicine, Lenny.  See you next summer.  Love Suzan.”

I was very pleased as I read and remained absorbed through to the end.  I was glad to see the extra information about what forms her friendship with Lenny in the present and the slight emphasis on understanding something about the importance of medicine for schizophrenics.  I’m glad we find out what they chat about and that Lenny asks for Judy’s number.  It keeps Judy present in the writer’s thoughts. When Suzan adds “as though death took her from me” concerning Pauline Holme’s name still in her address book, I like the intimation that memory is stronger than death. I very much need the images she weaves in about Judy as a child offering comfort from nightmares, wearing matching nighties and sneaking into the living room for gifts.  I find the deletion of “Grandma gave her address book back to me…” a good choice because although the information is accurate, having it there breaks up the stream for me of Grandma doing the giving by recording her Choice Bits.  I think the addition of a new Choice Bit about promising to be strong is very good and will prove to be very apt and helpful.  The information about how the family missed Judy when she was in Guam shows how tight knit Suzan’s family is.  The details we get concerning how the adult sisters spend time updates us nicely about their playful honesty.  When Suzan ties Judy’s current diagnosis in with Guam and the way Judy had come back in time to help Suzan through a difficult time in her life, we begin to see where the need for strength is coming from. Now the essayist will use all the essay has planted in the use of memories and Choice Bits to find the strength and attitude she needs to offer her sister what her sister needs.  This then leads her to her message to Lenny, and the medicine image evokes the medicine she has taken for herself and will continue to take.  Creating and using footprints to ultimate reveal a path and return the writer and the reader to the beginning but with the gift of insight from the word journey is exactly what essay writing is about.

Suzan accompanied this last draft with a note for Writing It Real readers:

When I thought this piece was finished nearly a year ago, I read it to my family including my sister.  I felt embarrassed, almost ashamed with the emphasis on Judy’s size: “Is Judy still fat?” as though that was funny.  I wasn’t satisfied with the piece but couldn’t figure out how to fix it – which is why I brought it to the writer’s conference at Steamboat Springs.  The response I received there and later in emails from Sheila helped me make Choice Bits what I feel, what I am scared about, and I am reminded that I always have inside and need each day–that is optimism (think only of the best, expect only the best).  When I read this again to my family, I will feel proud though I will cry.

Certainly they will be tears of love and of the truth beautifully told.