Wednesday Writing Therapy: Remember What It Was Like To Write For Someone

During my first Winter Break at Tufts, I flew home to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and, upon landing, informed my parents I had to visit my grandfather, who lived in Huntingdon, PA, a few hours away. I don't remember much of the visit except that, as I drove back home, my grandfather had a heart attack and died.

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My grandfather had always carried in his wallet a poem I'd written him, and he'd stop people on the street to read it to them. That he did such a thing maybe has more with my being a writer today than anything else. At the time, few people believed in me.

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I wrote another poem in those days after the funeral that my family had etched into his gravestone. (These two poems caused an odd moment at the memorial service when my great uncle confused the two, making it seem as if I'd written my grandfather a eulogy years before his death). My mom recently sent me a picture of the stone and poem, and I was struck (of course) by how awful the poem was, how embarrassing it was to have my name permanently attached to it.

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It took awhile for me to get past the poem's suckiness to that place of being that kid, walking with my grandfather along the streets of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, he its unofficial mayor, his tugging on the passerbys.

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"Wait until you hear what my grandson wrote for me."

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What he loved about it was that I wrote it for him, and I imagine the same is true of that poem on his gravestone. How much of my very early writing was written for someone, someone to whom I wanted to express something deeply personal and heartfelt.

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I took creative writing classes in college, left in 1987, didn't really get back to writing until 2003. These past 6 years, I've learned to write for readers, workshop participants, editors, other writers, slush readers, myself even, but perhaps forgot what it was like to write for an audience of one.

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So that is today's therapy session for myself. Remember how it felt to know that of all the things my grandfather could've carried with him to the end, it was what I'd written him. Write something like that again, something for someone in particular, something someone might fold, carry always, as I do my grandfather and all that he believed to be true about me.