TO KNOW ME IS TO LOVE ME

     I have been rereading Murakami’s  What I Talk About When I Talk About Running .  One passage stood out to me, which it must have stood out to me in an initial read as I had dog-eared the bottom page–something I do when I don’t have a pencil and want to remember. Towards the beginning of the book Murakami quotes Mick Jagger saying “I’d rather be dead than still singing ‘ Satisfaction ’ when I’m forty-five.” He then points out that at sixty Mick Jagger is still singing  Satisfaction . This book was published in 2007, so Mick Jagger is now 81 and is most likely still singing   Satisfaction .  The point being that many people often can’t see themselves at an older age. Myself included.      When I was 17 I would tell my friends that I never wanted to grow old. That I would go as far as killing myself at 40 to avoid aging. In my senior year of high school I truly didn’t see a future for myself. I had no idea what I wanted to be, wha...

     When I first started writing, writing seriously, I did so because I thought I was forgetting. Forgetting my childhood, forgetting important memories. Forgetting everything about myself. I felt like I only recalled the bad things. But I knew there were so many things that were good—good things, bad things, funny things, and sad things. Things that made me who I am. When I write I remember.  Tomorrow I turn 30. I wanted to write down what I’ve remembered:      I remember daycare. I remember peeing myself in my favorite dress on the sidewalk in the playground because the caretaker wouldn’t let me go inside. I remember the nursery rhyme characters on the outside of the building. I remember one worker who later became a cashier at the Safeway by our house. I remember nap time and never napping.      I remember kindergarten. Frosted animal crackers, the puppets on sticks we’d use to point at the calendar. The boy who gave me my first vale...