Sometimes stories fall into our laps. Meandering the streets of your neighborhood or city* keeps your lap friendly and inviting. Streets teem with people who have a story to tell.
It’s hot here in Kansas City, which means daily walks to the QuickTrip for a gargantuan-sized iced tea, my armament against the cloud of heat that gathers and settles in my attic office by mid-afternoon. Today, with tea in one hand and leash in another, I crossed the street to avoid passing another dog-walker. Big Dog is mild-mannered but weights 110 pounds, and my flimsy plastic cup is no match for even one of his cursory, lazy-dog tugs. (Like corporations, politicians, and Godzilla, the bigger the QT cup, the harder it collapses.)
As we drew abreast of our fellow pedestrian, he turned and—street-between-us-be-damned—started talking. He’d seen us at the QT, he said. And then, strolling across the street, he let sail his story of his recent operation, buoyed by that pressing compulsion everyone has to recount details of scary or monumental (same thing, right?) health incidents.
He’s not a complete, complete stranger. I’ve seen him outside his house; his front porch is filled with strange objects that sorta work as art. Like a hubcap hanging from a chain. He has a long strangly beard and teeth newly cleaned and restored by a tough go-around with treatment for gum disease. That was the precursor to the heart surgery he wanted to talk about, an operation that took place less than a week ago. He’s 49 and fit and already walking to QT, but the medications threw him for a loop. More accurately, they made him loopy.
“I couldn’t believe these oxycodones. I was looking out my hospital window and saw tractors driving by. They’re doing construction at the hospital but I was on the 14th floor! Then a crane would glide by. Maybe that was real? I couldn’t tell. Especially after vines started growing up the walls and across the tv screen. I did plenty of mushrooms and LSD in my day, but this was crazy.”
He went on to tell me about his son’s recent experience with mushrooms. The son and his girlfriend took them while they were camping.
“With nothing but the big sky to focus on,” my neighbor said. “I could never have done that. I need stimulation. I’m a city guy. Tripping out in the country would have driven me nuts. My son said it did them, too. Bad trips for both of them.” He seemed to feel genuinely bad for them. He understood.
He’s a rough-looking character, a trucker by trade who wears t-shirts with sleeves cut down to the waist. His vibe couldn’t be further from the impression his appearance makes, and the brief conversation made me happy.
He slowly crossed back to his side of the street, talking as he did so: mention of his girlfriend, a quick description of his incision. It’s a cut that revealed the heart of a kind, interesting, and sweet man. As we parted ways, the world seemed just a little bigger.
 
 
 
*Go read Alfred Kazin’s /A Walker in the City/. Then go take a walk. Then tell me how it went.

There are scads of books written about how to structure your novel, and even more on structuring a screenplay. But what about my speciality—life stories and family histories?
Right, right. Life stories and family histories, I know they’re two different beasts. But they each share several traits not found in typical novels: a meandering, episodic story; the need to include bits of detail, exposition, and even anecdotes that do not necessarily add to a narrative arc; a narrative drive defined less by conflict than by the often warm, comfortable memories of a lifetime. Not that there’s any life devoid of conflict, it’s just that most people don’t want a book representing their life as a continual struggle, especially if when they’re looking back on it they are filled with happy memories. The audience for a life storybook or a family history is different than the audience for a traditionally published book, and so are the reasons for writing one. It’s less about entertaining an unknown public than it is about sharing your history with family and close friends and generations of family to come.  Family, both present and future, will want to know things that the general public would have no interest in: the layout of a grandmother’s old farmhouse, the color of your mother’s prom dress, the nature of the argument that left two great aunts estranged for over 60 years. All elements that must be woven into the life story or family history that in a traditional book would be nothing more than odds and ends needing to be cut.
But I’ve got to believe that there is a structure that exists that best serves these types of books. Not a template, but a guiding set of principles.  It’s my intention with this website to document my search for this structure, to present what I find that works, and what doesn’t work. I work on an hourly basis for my clients, and they deserve the most efficient and effective process that I can bring to their project. Like all personal historians, I want to gather up the memories and reflections of my clients and present them as artfully as possible in the medium in which I work, long-form narrative. This is my search on how to do that best.
If you have any insight into this, I’d love to hear it.

Death has a way of making your mind sticky (other people’s death, that is, presumably not your own. But who knows?). Wisps of thought are caught in the mass of gray folds, thoughts that on better days would barely skim the surface before disappearing. The smell of your mother’s hands when you, five or six, sat in her lap, pulled palms and long-tapered fingers up to your face and inhaled deeply: /Mom/. The melody of her well-modulated voice, like water over cool, smooth rocks, even after dementia robbed the words of any sense. A worried look (worrying equaled loving), a blazing smile. A conversation with Big Sister, aged 8, on the quiet, prideful joy of having the prettiest mom in the class.
Here’s what you don’t want to do while your mother’s brain is going dark and death is thundering its way toward her: Don’t play an audio of her voice. Don’t play an audio of her voice over the stereo from three years earlier. Of her talking, and making sense, and reminiscing about her childhood. Don’t play it. You may think it will help your kids remember their grandma before the trouble with her brain going dark, but it’s cheating. It’s too soon. It’s dangerous. It’s a shout below a precipice of snow, an avalanche in the making. Let the wisps come and stay if they want. Don’t force the “good memories” because at certain times, those are worse than remembering your mother’s gray, slackened jaw as the men from the funeral home carried her away. Let the wisps come. For now, let go of the rest.