“In English, the term memoir comes directly from the French for memory, mémoire, and yet more deeply rooted in the word memoir…is the ancient Greek, mermeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian memara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mermer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’ In this darker light of human language, the term suggests a literary form that is much less confident than today’s novelistic memoir, with its effortlessly relayed experiences.”
Memoirs are the simplest way of telling ourselves stories. We tell ourselves stories from our past not just to remember, but to align ourselves back with our narrative. We look for reasons in retrospect. We tell ourselves stories. Since the time of the cave dwellers, we have attempted to take the random events of our existence and embellish them into something that makes sense. Writing has the quality of an initiation. Memoirs are in some sense about performing a wake after a death. They are soothing yet disorienting. They exist not just to fuck with you, but to reorient you.
Years after I finally got comfortable putting out these stories, I got a call from a friend of a friend who worked as a named partner in a law firm at Back Bay. He asked if I could spare some time to have a conversation with him. He had by chance stumbled upon some of my work and asked our mutual friend to arrange a meeting if I worked or lived nearby. He wondered if I might be able to meet with him. I admit, I was curious. It’s not every day that I get a call like that, out of the blue. What did this guy want? He wanted to meet up at Four Seasons, a short 15-minute ride away. It was late evening when I finally got out of work and took the chauffeured car that he had insistently sent to the lobby of the hotel. The place was no quiet country B&B. The latest sketch by Rainer Lagemann hangs in the state-of-the-art lounge, its yellow and blue swirls the only color in a room filled with white sofas and chaises draped with white cashmere blankets. The effect is of a heavenly sanitarium complete with haute cuisine and a lavender-scented restroom tucked in the corner.
The man and his wife greeted me in the lobby.
“I’ll leave you two,” said the wife. She was a lovely woman, perhaps fifteen years older than me. She was wrapped in a cashmere shawl, her hair smoothly falling over her shoulders. “He has a lot to talk to you about.”
I followed the man into the ornate room. He was quite tall, distinguished even in his evening casual clothes, gray-haired, and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. As the waiter arrived with a vodka Martini and he settled on the sofa, I wondered. What was he looking for? He had a way about him — a certain kindness in his face — that reminded me of my father. I guessed he was in his mid-sixties.
“I loved some of your writing,” he said. “They meant a lot to me.”
Mosaic is very much a person’s story — a memoir of the observations I had made on the events in my life and that of others. A story of the different shades of tragedies we all go through in life. Why would it speak to him?
Another waitress whisked away the saucer on which we had placed our used stirrers and olives. There was an absolute absence of clutter. Even the garbage cans were empty.
The man reached for his drink, held it for a second, and then set it down without taking a sip.
“I was the last person to exit from the Taj Hotel before the terrorist attack,” he said. “Those guys passed by me. Someone held the door open for me. I don’t know who it was. Later, I remembered things. I remembered the sight of an arm reaching out” — here his voice cracked — “and holding the door open, pushing me out while I was rooted there.”
He went on to tell me the details: he’d been having dinner with a partner who was setting up a new regional office in Mumbai and he recalled the partner asking to discuss more details, but he was jetlagged and wanted to get back to his hotel — The Oberoi, a couple of miles away. As he left the restaurant, he stopped at a table to greet an acquaintance, but the person got a phone call so they cut their discussion short — his life saved not once but twice, based on timing and split-second choices.
He shrugged. It looked almost involuntary, like a tick. “Maybe it was how it was meant to be”
He looked at me, this man with a kind face who reminded me of my father. His eyes, behind his glasses, were filled with the bottomless pain on his own good fortune. All around us, men and women walked by, laughing and smiling.
“I keep thinking there has to be a reason,” said the man. “Something I’m supposed to do now. Only I don’t know what it is.”
I was certain that there was no reason. No reason at all. There was only this: luck, timing, and consequences. Infinitesimal moments that added up and became personal tragedies, personal miracles. God wasn’t up in the sky pulling the strings. There was only one thing to say — one thing I understood from my own life, my own personal tragedies. Finally, I understood why this man had responded to some of my writing. My friend’s suicide wasn’t an event that changed the world, but it certainly was an event that had changed me. I had risen out of the ashes of that sadness and loss and did the only thing worth doing. I had tried to become a better person — For her.
“You make it mean something. That’s all you can do.”, he said.
