“I’ve Been Wondering”

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH PATTI

PERSONAL ESSAY BY PATTI CALLAHAN

08/04/2021

It is the dog days of summer and I’ve been thinking so much about past summers in my life.

My parents, who are in their eighties, just recently moved and they asked me to help with some decisions: what do we do with all these tapes and VCRs? So I took the box and sent it all off to be digitalized. A couple months later, eleven tapes had been turned into one little flash drive stick.

Simply amazing.

I started watching some of the old twitchy film and found myself watching myself. It’s an odd and disconnected feeling seeing yourself at every age, many of which you don’t remember. Little Patti running on the beach, hamming it up for the camera, jumping from rock to rock in Cape Cod.

And it has made me wonder about the idea that so much of our life is unremembered, and yet surely some part of us knows.

Some unconscious and subconscious part of us remembers. Maybe we dream about the past in fragmented pieces, or we hear a song or smell an aroma and suddenly we are back in another time.

Every memory must live somewhere other than scratchy film.

And that is part of the reason I wrote Once Upon a Wardrobe.

I knew that bits and pieces of C. S. Lewis’s life and found their way into Narnia and I wanted to understand. And when I wonder, I write.

I have so much exciting news coming up about this book and book club and…just stay tuned!

What I’m reading now:

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller.

What I’m watching now:

The Olympics!

What I’m listening to now:

The podcast Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen

What I’m enjoying:

The quiet of the North Carolina mountains

Hope you are enjoying your summer!

—Patti