"Always too nostalgic. Now, just living."

Six-word memoirs from writers famous and obscure

Above is my six-word memoir. The idea of writing autobiographies using six words or less is being promoted by Smith Magazine. They are hosting thousands upon thousands of these little reductions, where you can submit your own.

About my memoir, though, I've been learning to give up my nostalgia. I'm doing this by becoming more comfortable with uncertainty. It has been fear, I think, that has driven me into the safety of remembering and living in the past. Even memories of bad events felt safer than mysteries of the future or the complexity of the present.

But that's the wrong way to live! When you close yourself off that way to the fear, you close yourself off to experience, too. I'm determined to stop dreaming away my life.

Took Her Radio and Hocked it, Radio and Hocked it

Hey, Eddie, can you lend me a few bucks?

My new hobby is my iPod. I really am converted to their cult. It's so mind-bogglingly fun to carry all of my music around with me wherever I go.

I'm using it as a way to reconnect to old albums I long ago discarded. I moved a lot in my college years and I jettisoned vinyl albums because they were all used and scratched anyway and I got tired of lugging them around. Besides, you could always find a used record store to buy back the albums for pennies on the dollar. CDs sounded better to me, anyway. Vinyl seemed then--and still now--inferior and obsolete.

One of the albums I've recently reunited with is Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. I've got it on shuffle, which mixes its songs with the songs of just about every other album I own. I just heard my favorite song off the album, "Meeting Across the River."

It's one of those time-machine songs that transports me to my high school years even though the album was, at that point, more than 10 years old. I had consciously forgotten the song. The title didn't jump out at me in the track listing the way "Thunder Road" had. Subconsciously, though, I know every word. On hearing it, each line of lyrics popped back into my head just before Bruce delivered it. It's a weird karaoke feeling.

I came to this part of the song:

Well Cherry says she's gonna walk
'Cause she found out I took her radio and hocked it

In my mind, though, the line skips because that's what it did every time I played that record. I hated that about vinyl. I used to imagine what the line was supposed to sound like, sometimes trying to fix it by singing it out. Now, though, I'm doing the opposite, playing it over and over again, and trying to insert that little vocal hiccup.

My slight disappointment in the song's digital perfection is temporary. I'll put the song in "heavy rotation" (now that I've found it again) and hearing the correct version will, over time, buff out the uniquely incorrect version inside my head. I'm okay with that.

A Cubic Foot of Memory Suspended in the Air

Castaic Lake, CA

I took Cinder to Battle Point Park last week. It was a rare sunny winter day. We walked around the park, I occasionally throwing the ball for her, but mostly just walking along. We saw high school kids playing lacrosse, joggers, and lazy geese who didn't fly any farther south. We wandered around the far edge of the park, up against its southern boundary fence, and cutting back across a field to where we had left the car, I walked into a smell identical to that of fishing at dawn with my father at Castaic Lake.

I walked out of the smell before I recognized what it was and paused, trying to figure out how a field in Washington during afternoon hours could smell so much like a distant time and space. It smelled like the location, but not the event. I didn't smell my father's cigarette, the oily Coppertone lotion, or the garlic cheese paste we used as bait. I retraced my steps, leading with my nose, trying to find that smell again. I walked back and forth; I walked in circles. I couldn't find it.

My stumbling search was interrupted by a child's voice. She was in a stroller pushed along the path by her mother. The girl was shouting something, testing out words. As they passed by, the little girl leaned out of the stroller, pointed at me, and said "Papa dead!"

I waited in the middle of the field for a few minutes in case there was a message coming from beyond, but nothing happened. Maybe what the girl really said was "Papa dog."