Trail’s End Cafe

Sinking into a lumpy brown corduroy chair next to a teetering bookcase stacked with musty boxes of Scrabble and Monopoly, I flip open my notebook. The watery blue lines on the page offer options to write on top or between. Sometimes I disregard the rules altogether, loop high and low with handwriting I don’t recognize as mine.

My memoir group meets Tuesday mornings in this backroom of the Trail’s End Cafe. The air is thick with railroad history and dust; blurry black and white photos hang crooked on the peeling plaster walls. Sounds and smells of the modern espresso machine in the front of the building reach around the corner.

In this former passenger waiting room, I pull up a creaky wooden chair to use as a foot rest, and invite my childhood to join me. The writing prompts are random and vague. The time limit is 20 minutes to scribble whatever comes to mind. The rule is no judgement or editing: just write.

I never realized I had stories to tell of being four years old in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, of being six or ten years old and then sixteen. Yet seemingly innocent, unrelated prompts bobbed countless memories to the surface. My foster sister who left our house without warning two days after she turned 18. My spinster aunt who drowned herself in the river that flowed behind her dog kennels. My father’s illness and death when I was only 13. Dramatic fights with my mother against each other, then as two distinct forces joined against her cancer.

I remember simple moments in my bones, like soaking my feet in the kitchen sink after barefoot days spent in the coal dust outside and inside our first floor flat. The quirky neighbor who fed squirrels by hand, and gossip from the tavern across the street. All life details I had forgotten, or at the very least judged unworthy of recounting.

Instead I work hard to mid-wife other people’s stories while failing to recognize my own. In the mid-1990’s my mother’s integrative oncologist asked me to “find his voice” and tell his heroic tale of bringing eastern ways to western cancer care. Meanwhile, I am in the midst of my own epic journey with my dying mother, prompted by shamanic dreams in a time spirited with synchronicities. I assume my experiences are too personal to be of interest or benefit to others.

In the next decade I throw myself into writing brilliant descriptions and editing beautiful books for an internationally renown artist. During that period my own clay sculpture is growing to person-size, a remarkable blossoming unique in the ceramic world. But I remain focused outside of myself, on someone else’s success. Unable to breakthrough my personal writing blocks, I can not string together a single sentence about my own work or creative process.

Continually clueless to the parallels, a few years later I sign a contract to write the life story of a man inspired by his relationship with a world-famous architect. I spend countless hours on the phone and in person, eight days a week, trying to get him to share his experiences so I can convey them. I dreamed they would inspire others on their creative journey.

“The juice is in the personal details. Be brave,” I would coax. “Paint the everyday with a vulnerable brush — your authenticity will open hearts and touch others deeply.”

My persuasion and projections fall short. It is his story to tell, not mine. The project goes no where.

Now, in this worn chair soaked in the nostalgia of the countless journeys begun and ended in this train station, I revisit my own journeys. Uncomfortable yet somehow easy, this experience is brand new. I turn around to look at my past, stay still in the present, and squint to look inside. At long last, I am open to healing through a taste of my own medicine.