Mama Kat’s Writers Workshop

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”  you’re probably thinking.  “What happened to Thankful Thursday?” Well, I’ve decided to move that to Sundays while I explore the wonderful world of Mam Kat’s Writer’s Workshop, a faboo thing I just discovered and really want to try.  


The deal with the Writer’s Workshop is that Mam Kat over at Mama’s Losin’ It posts a bunch of thought provoking writing prompts and people write about them.  And I’m all about having someone thinking up good blog ideas for me so here goes!

1.) If you had to relive a day in your life what day would it be?

In the summer of 2000, I went to the beach with my extended family for a few days.  We were all staying in a rented house that we had rented before, and playing on a beach that we had played on before, and going to a boardwalk that we had gone to before.  The faces around the dinner table were faces that I had seen before, my aunts, uncles, and cousins.  My parents, my grandparents. It was a familiar respite from life, a summer tradition, loaded with joy, laughter, boardwalk french fries with malt vinegar, sand between our toes, and the occasional filial outburst born of old rivalries.

It was so familiar that I don’t remember many of the details.  Was that the summer my uncle lost a game of Scrabble to my aunt and stomped away from the board muttering obscenities? Was that the year my young cousins were always off in a corner playing the card game Bullshit? Were we reading the Harry Potter books that summer?  Did my cousin’s husband teach us how grill corn that year?  I don’t remember.  All the summers blur and the memories are like one long vacation, always the same beach, the same boardwalk, the faces growing imperceptibly older.

There are two things about that summer that I do remember.  One is that I was leaving.  After that vacation I was going back to my apartment near DC to pack what things I hadn’t sold and would be moving across the country for a relationship that was doomed to fail.  I didn’t know then that it was doomed to fail.  I only knew that only a week after I stood there with my feet in the Atlantic, I would reach the Pacific coast and settle into my new life in San Diego. My mind was on my move.  It was an adventure and I was too enraptured with the whole idea to see the disapproval and worry everyone who knew me and knew my paramour radiated about my choice. I had my eyes ahead on the next thing and perhaps I did not relax enough into that week at the beach.  Perhaps that why so many details are lost to time.

And I remember sitting on the couch in our rental house with my aunts and my grandmother and watching the summer Olympics.  The gymnastics events were on and my grandmother, a salty old broad with a sense of humor that trended raunchy, kept commenting on male gymnasts.  Specifically their buns.

Was that my last day there?  Or another day?  Did I laugh out loud? Did I hug Grandmom?  I hope so.  Because that was the last time I saw her.  Days after I arrived in California, Alzheimer’s disease and complications related to it took Grandmom away forever.  And I don’t remember that last day I spent with her at the beach. Even though I knew, we all knew, she was sick, we all knew her time was short.  I didn’t think to brand those days into my memory forever.

If I could, I would go back and not change a thing about my last day at the beach in 2000.  I would live it exactly the same.  I would just remember to remember it.