THE INTIMATE PERSONAL, BUT WHY?

The intimate personal is the #1 Rule of memoirists, novelists, poets, playwrites, noodlers, doodlers, and bloggers.

Their readers want to know things, not necessarily first hand.

Something on a page, or screen, is more than enough.

But, someone’s still got to get it there. Some of my favorites:

I had a short career in competitive sports, which is the norm.

Football from grade school through high school.

Wrestling from high school to college and the Army.

I ran a non-competitive 10K in forty two minutes, finishing with the lady runners in full make-up.

One non-competitive marathon ended after 3:32.

I bring this up because although short, there were a few highlights, which aren’t the same as anyone else’s.

My biggest victory in all of sports was a tie, a 3-3 tie.

Years later at a fundraiser I saw the guy and told him our story.

It was the second match of a three man Round Robin at the Junior National Wrestling Championship at the University of Iowa.

My guy had decisioned the first guy, then tied with me. Then I wrestled the guy he decisioned and lost by one point for a disappointing, but still all-American, third place.

I’m smiling and talking, then listened while he told me he didn’t really remember our match.

As big a deal as it’s been to me my entire life, it’s nothing to anyone else. Which is the norm.

That’s an intimate personal anecdote from sports, but who cares about sports when readers want a love story.

Get Married They Said, It’ll Be Fun

Early on you can’t tell who, which man or woman, will be a marrying machine any more than you can tell who will never be married.

But, there are clues.

I talked to a college girl who had dated an Italian prince, a football player, a pizza joint owner, and me.

Somehow I fit in there, then I didn’t, and life carried on without another happy couple who weren’t too happy but didn’t know it.

My takeaway? Don’t make serious decisions when one of you is more serious than the other. You’ll either be playing catch up the rest of your life, or slowing down for the other one to catch up.

Neither one is optimal. In fact, they both breed a strain of bitterness that can come out as, “I could have been somebody.”

We wrote letters back in those days, fewer and fewer over time, which is the norm.

After I met my happy place girl I wrote a letter about getting married.

She wrote back that she had divorced her husband and planned on traveling with her two kids and maybe they’d stop in for the wedding.

Which isn’t the norm, but still not that unusual. I mean, who hasn’t had an ex-girlfriend invite themselves to your wedding with their kids?

Too Much Intimate Personal?

I got married, still married, and didn’t have a clue I’d be one of those guys, the married once guys, not with a grandad in the family tree who’d been married seven time, with parents divorced and remarried.

What were the odds of staying together?

Now in our ‘golden years’ there’s a specter of the Gray Divorce.

I told one of my kids, you know who you are, that the pressure to be a good parent never ends.

Kid: Really? What exactly do you see as pressure to be a parent. Your parental responsibilities?

Me: The biggest is keeping the black marks off my name and carry on. No police reports, no tickets, no flameout, no grudges, no petty bullshit, no fucking up like a fuck up fucks up.

Kid: That’s a lot of pressure on you.

Me: I was talking about you.

April 30th, 1975, Vietnam War Over

Today marks the end of the Vietnam War.

It’s also the date that marks the end or the ‘Vietnam Era.’

Having rebuilt their forces and upgraded their logistics system, North Vietnamese forces triggered a major offensive in the Central Highlands in March 1975. On April 30, 1975, NVA tanks rolled through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, effectively ending the war.

It was an era of life long health concerns.

Since then more health problems in more groups arise, like the Blue Water Navy and agent orange.

It’s agent orange and more, like agent orange in Korea.

The Vietnam Era? What’s it mean now?

Senseless acts of violence numb civilized people to accept more of the same. No one can argue that torture is an acceptable tactic, the same as there’s no defense of blood lusting massacres.

You might ask which is worse before you leap to condemn every action out of your comfort zone.

Torture or massacre?

Don’t mean nothing, just everything.

The intimate personal starts so big it’s barely noticed, then gets so small we can all feel it.

And it feels right?