Raw Petai: Six word memoir

Tom couldn’t have chosen a worse time to tag me to write a six-word memoir. He hit me on what could possibly be the worse Monday of MY LIFE (okay, maybe the 21st century, or maybe just this year) – my laptop died on me, leaving me hanging for a couple of days wondering if the hard drive survived the meltdown; and I came down with the mother of all flus.

So my six-word memoir could have been “Damn you, motherboard and nasty bugs.”

Anyway, the memoir rules are…

1) Write your own six-word memoir
2) Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want
3) Link to the person that tagged you in your post, and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
4) Tag at least five more blogs with links
5) Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Had a hard time with this, not with coming up with six words but with something that seemed representative of a life lived (or being lived). I thought of generic pearls that I try to go by – “Aim for perfection; prepare for failure” but they seem too generic in a bumper-sticker, Hallmark-ish way.

Many combinations reflect concerns of specific life periods. “Renew marriage licences every seven years” comes from a less optimistic period of me and my friends’ lives, and reflects a belief that marriages would have a better survival rate if the piece of paper that binds two people together automatically lapsed after a certain period, forcing the couple to recommit their lives again if they wish to remain legally together (the Fraternity of Divorce Lawyers threatened to take out a contract on my life if I promoted this idea).

Love is often defined in grand gestures – dying on the cross for Everyone; jumping in the path of a bullet for family; giving up an organ; getting down on your knees with a 12-K diamond ring; throwing down your Armani coat on a puddle for the lady; buying 12 dozen roses on Valentine’s Day. But my parents taught me a different lesson about love, and they did it not by sitting me down and giving me A Big Lecture, but through their un-showy, humble actions. Love is “Serving in small ways, every day.”

Every mention of Dungeness crabs, Point Reyes, Alice Waters, the Giants, Frog Hollow Farm peaches sends me into the depths of homesickness. Is “I miss Half Moon Bay sunsets” a six word memoir?

But being back home with family has been a truly wonderful experience, especially gastronomically, as this blog stands witness to. So, my half a dozen-word summation of all that my life on earth has stood for, till this very day, and for many more to come, is:

“I’m only marking time between meals.”