Memory Care
Not a place where memories are held safely, but actually where they are disappearing fast.
Author’s Note: I’ll be sending out 1-2 longreads (1000+ word) essays a month on Friday. I hope you enjoy them!
Originally 2023
I first met Frank when I was a very scared, overwhelmed and young girl. My family had recently moved—pulling me from my comfortable little bubble and dumping me in a strange new world. Even though we now lived closer to my extended family, I still retreated into myself while navigating new social circles. That’s where Frank existed—as a friend of my relatives and a parishioner at our church.
Then, at a summer beach barbecue as we both remember it, my young self approached Frank, asked if I could sit on his lap and proceeded to talk to him. From then on, we became great friends. I spent many events in the ensuing decades talking to Frank about art, writing, literature, entrepreneurship, business, communication, travel and language.
As I got older, we also met outside family events at coffee shops to discuss our individual writing projects. The last time we did this was during that first pandemic summer. Frank and I sat on his driveway on patio furniture he’d set out front. I brought a cappuccino for him and a latte for me. He had several books about Italy and Mars for us to sift through. Then, we talked about his in-progress work about a young girl exploring the red planet.
Not long after—or I guess two years later—his family placed Frank in memory care. What an odd word! As I type this, it seems to imply a place where memories are held safely, but in actuality, they’re disappearing at a fast rate. Or maybe they’re still there, but whatever vessels gave them shape are fast eroding. So they mix together like gases in the atmosphere and combine in odd and nebulous ways. When I visited Frank, I could see him searching for his stories, but the details evaded him. I held his hands while he navigated his mind—as if it were now some alien city and he didn’t know where to go next.
A few weeks ago, I went to visit Frank’s wife. I picked up some coffee and drove to their beachside cul-de-sac. I remember thinking how this route is well-worn like a stream bed in my mind. Even if in a dream, I could find my way here. We enjoyed some fat slices of pumpkin bread in the living room, and then she asked if I wanted to peruse Frank’s bookshelf.
“Of course!” I said. She led me into his study.
If you’re a bibliophile, then bookshelves are magical places. Like archaeological digs or sunken ships or unexplored space, I love digging through them for buried treasures. I never know what I’m looking for or what I might find, but the book I take becomes tied to the moment, the place, the person I was, the things I was thinking, etc. Then like a time capsule, I’m able to relive them when I pull the tome from my own shelf. When taken together, my bookshelf is a library that catalogs the things I thought and who I was. So it was bittersweet to stand in front of Frank’s bookshelf. I felt as if I was looking at the man himself—the cabinet of curiosities of his seven decades of life—moreso than if I was sitting with him now.
“I’ll just borrow them,” I said. My fingers gently touched the books’ spines.
“No,” his wife disagreed. “He’d want you to have them.” She also said it was OK if I didn’t re-shelve them properly. (I still tried.)
She’s right, of course. A bibliophile loves their books as dearly as their friends. And I believe that at some point in the later Frank will know that I have his books. He’ll be glad his beloved things are still being loved.
That’s why I’m writing this reading list for you all. Because Frank influenced me so much, and in browsing his bookshelf and reading his books, he’s still shaping my mind. I want to continue to amplify that influence—for you to know something of Frank and who he was/is. The two greatest talents of his life were teaching and talking. So honestly, you reading this article would just tickle him to death.
Here’s what I choose and why:
Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
“In a stable world the standard situations of the past still apply. But in a changing world [they do not. … .] We need to design our way forward. We need to be thinking about ‘what can be,’ not just about ‘what is.’”
Since the mid-1980s, Frank ran his own independent management consulting business. It took him all over the world, and I loved to hear about his experiences in Dubai or Brazil. In fact, I think Frank originally planted the idea of entrepreneurship into my brain. He was always telling me how to be a businesswoman especially when it came to communicating with people. He even wrote several booklets about self-employment and mentored many people as a career coach.
So it’s interesting to me that I chose this book of the many professional titles on his shelf. In it, de Bono describes a methodology to encourage better parallel thinking among teams. He writes that by guiding the team through a thinking exercise of “six hats,” managers can create a safer space for collaboration.
Each hat—white, red, black, yellow, green, blue—represents a way for the team to address the matter at hand through the same lens. Instead of asking for more creative thinking, de Bono says you request more “green hat” thinking from the group. This lowers judgement, invites higher participation and that leads to faster decisions and greater exploration of ideas.
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
“The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. […] Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery.”
As much as Frank was enmeshed in the professional world, he believed/s sincerely in the essential contributions of creativity and art. His shelf demonstrates how he found value across many genres, and we often talked about this intersection. We were/are both writing sci-fi novels; there was always lots to discuss.
There’s been a lot of technology panic lately with the introduction of ChatGPT and AI. Once again, there’s doom and gloom around investing in the creative arts. That’s why I think I pulled this Lehrer title out of Frank’s shelf for he had more than one. In it, Lehrer, who is a neuroscientist, explores how artistic discovery by creatives like Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust predated scientific discovery. That the efforts of these writers to explore the human condition demonstrate how the truth can be documented outside of a calculation or algorithm.
The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
“When I walk into the white room […] I am alone with my: body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears. These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I’m going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I’ve learned to channel my experiences into them.”
Frank was always writing and reading. His dedication to the creative habit is something he did share extensively—like with me.
Currently, I feel very far away from my creative self because of all the uncertainty in the world. Plus, there was that pandemic! One way I’ve been getting back to it is by going to the theatre, and I saw my first ballet in 3 years—a wonderful production of Like Water for Chocolate by the American Ballet. At the end of this little meander is Frank because his shelf contained this book by one of America’s greatest choreographers. I’m only two chapters in, and I already feel very refreshed.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
“The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to [the noble gases].”
There are many books about Italy, by Italians or in Italian on Frank’s bookshelf. It’s an important country in his history—he met his wife there when he was stationed overseas. So I felt I needed to take one, and this is the one I chose because Frank and I love when unexpected things get connected. Primo Levi opens this book of memoirs by comparing how the noble or inert and unseen gases of the periodic table are comparable to the unseen and inert histories of his ancestors. From there, or at least so far, Levi jumps into a dissection of his family tree.
Deep Design: Nine Little Art Histories by Libby Lumpkin
“To ask how an object makes its meaning is not the same as asking why the object exists.”
I began my design career almost two decades ago, and so, I plucked this book out of Frank’s shelf for professional reasons. What I got is another title that cuts a road through history, science, technology, design, language and art. In Lumpkin’s first essay, she constructs a condensed history of the Smiley Face. She then backtracks through the Renaissance to the Mona Lisa to consider what about a smile itself is so alluring.
But what makes this book more dear to me is the note I found written in the main flap to Frank from his daughter; this book must be a gift from her. She’s another independent artist-type person of whom Frank was very proud. In it she wrote: “To my papa who has inspired art to be seen in the most everyday things. Your joy at how to solve anything makes this little world such an interesting place.”
archy and mehitabel by Don Marquis
“dear boss you may think what you do is great art, but to me writing is just a big headache”
Archy is a cockroach. He writes poetry by jumping about the keys of a typewriter, which is why there’s no proper punctuation. Marquis explains that Archy was a freeverse poet in a previous life while Mehitabel the cat claims to be a reincarnation of Cleopatra.
Frank gifted me this book on the completion of my first publishable manuscript. So I do own this book, but he has a copy on his own shelf. He typed out the following note that I still keep tucked inside: “When I was writing my unpublished novel in 1961 I taped a copy of this message from archy above my writing table. Writing has been an important part of my life and I know and admire how much it is important to you. I look forward to following your literary career as it unfolds and you blossom.”
This book has since become one of the books of poetry I recommend most to others.
Dearest Enemy: a friendship by Sarah Dzida
“Would a kind-hearted Nemesis such as you write my Wedding Sway? I would be ever so proud to amble toward my future on your words. With breathing of fire and slinging of ninja stars, Foe.”
This little hybrid poetry memoir is inspired by a creative friendship of mine with the writer Katrina Swenson. It tracks all the ways we inspired each other to write after college—me from Japan and her from Spokane—by speaking to the other as if we were enemies.
I found that Frank had both of my books on his shelf. The first is a chapbook from the poetry foundation Beyond Baroque. The second is this title. Once, Frank told me he liked to keep my books nearby to skim whenever he wanted. So I’m including my book on this list to remind us all that we don’t need a large following or a bajillion likes to make an impact. You just need one person who who holds your work with care in their life and that is really nice to have in a chaotic world.