The following is long, disjointed and un-proofread but it does have to do with writing, I swear!

Part of this is from a journal entry so I am going to *over-share* and get a little more personal in this than I normal do in a blog post.

My great Aunt Millie lived in Florida. She used to visit my grandparents every few years and stay for a few weeks. She didn’t talk much. She didn’t seem to enjoy our company.

As a kid, I hated having her around. It was awkward. She took the easy familiarity of the immediate family and made it uncomfortable with her outsider-ness. I did not look forward to her visits. She just sat there in silence and made me feel like our family banter was on public display.

Then she, seemingly randomly, moved up to NJ to live near my grandparents. My grandfather (her brother) couldn’t stand her. My grandmother felt obligated to be nice to her. Why she wanted to move up north to live with two people who only seemed to tolerate her was as much a mystery to me as her visits.

When Aunt Millie died, no one told us for 3 days. At this point, Aunt Millie was an every holiday sort of relative so this was a bit weird. But she’d been in a nursing home and had dementia so we were expecting it.

Before her death, the total of what I knew about Aunt Millie could be summed up thus:

• She visited the only members of our family that were still in Italy and sold them our farm. This farm was either a walnut or an olive farm depending on what year you happened to catch this story. 
• She changed her name from Carmella (awesome, beautiful name) to Mildred (God-awful, vile name) thus making her forever un-relatable to me. 
• When my family had an ancient Egyptian theme party, every single person came dressed in Cleopatra style for the girls and like Tutankhamen for the boys. Aunt Millie came in a bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her head. As I kid, I thought she was out of her mind. My parents explained that she was trying to look like a modern day Egyptian but it was just a big reminder of how she stuck out in my immediate family like a sore thumb whenever she came up.
• She tried to steal my brother’s leather jacket once at Christmas (dementia).
• She was a bit player in a hilarious and much beloved family anecdote that centers around the underside of my grandfather’s car being on fire.

I knew this woman for my entire life and she didn’t die until I was out of college and this was the sum total of everything I knew about her at the time of her death. By the end, she was coming to just about every holiday and we saw her all the time I she was still basically a stranger to me.
 
After she died, we helped my grandparents go through her stuff and we started to find out that dull as paint drying Aunt Millie was possibly the most interesting person in the world.

• She worked under General MacArthur while he was stationed in Japan during World War II.
• She had some mysterious lover over there no one knows anything about (Or if they do, they aren’t talking, I tried).
• She had moved to NJ because her family in Florida had disowned her when they found out she was still friendly with my grandparents.
• Her beloved nephew died and no one told her, she found out through mutual friends months later.
• She was living in this horrible little trailer home but had a lot of money that all went to medicare in the end.

Then amid the mysteries we learned about her life, her stuff unearthed even more.

• There was a beautiful blue saki set that was filled with rotting Parmesan cheese.
• There were rooms and rooms of knitting projects she was in the middle of. She was pretty darn good.
• There was an engagement ring setting with the diamond missing.
• She was trying to get two different novels published. One was a romance. My grandmother threw them both out without letting anyone in the family at least read them. (I know!)
• She was a member of hundreds of clubs or, at least, she had the membership pins of hundreds of clubs.

I stood there in the center of this house full of clutter and mysteries and felt so guilty. Here was this woman, this really interesting woman with clearly tons of fascinating stories to tell and she was a complete and utter stranger to every one of us. She was, it should be said, by all accounts also kind of a jerk, but that doesn’t change the fact that she was, if nothing else, an interesting jerk. For all I know, she may not have really been a jerk, I sure never spoke more than a few words to her in passing.

I think it also really affected me that she was trying to shop around two books. Here was someone I had pretty much decided was impossible to relate to from a very young age because she changed her name TO Mildred (on purpose!) and she and I had much more in common than I know. When my grandmother told me she threw out the novels, I was so mad at her but, at the same time, it was such a typically grandma thing to do that I had to just let it go rather than make her feel bad.

I got this idea in my head at that time that this was a topic rife with storytelling material. I started a project I tentatively called Meeting Millie. I wanted to take the scenes in the present (us finding these strange objects, the bits and pieces of information my grandparents would drop, etc) and intersperse them with Aunt Millie’s past. I wanted to do as much research as I could and fictionalize the sections of Aunt Millie’s life we didn’t know and fill in the blanks.

I did a good bit of work on this project but all the scenes I wrote were from the present because that was what was going on at the time. Just about every little thing I mentioned above has its own little “scene” that goes with it that I wrote up with the intention of putting it in this project.

Something became clear to me as I worked on this, however. I was writing a lot more about my parents and my grandparents than Aunt Millie. I really needed to force myself to focus on her in the stories. I realized I needed to really “love” Aunt Millie to be able to make the story about her and, no matter how interesting and mysterious she turned out to be, I still didn’t really like her, let alone love her. But I was really enjoying writing about my family.

So I started to rethink it. Maybe the story wasn’t about Millie so much as it was about everything else. I toyed for a while of reversing the project and trying to fill in the blanks in other family member’s lives before realizing that wasn’t it either.

I focused down on the most famous Aunt Millie story, the one that gets referenced several times every time my family gets together. It’s about the fact that, for years, Aunt Millie would talk about when she visited the olive farm our family used to own in Italy. Then, one day, it was a walnut farm. When we questioned the change, she insisted it had always been a walnut farm, she’d never said olive. She stuck to this despite the testimony of many witnesses and video evidence to the contrary.

So I started to realize that maybe this was the story. Maybe the story is about stories, the way that family stories mutate and change and after a while it doesn’t matter what the truth actually was because the story is the thing. After so many re-tellings, the mistake becomes the truth and it doesn’t matter if it was ever a walnut or an olive farm, it is now forever “that olive farm that became a walnut farm.” I started to realize that, deep down, I actually don’t care if it is an olive or a walnut farm and I don’t want to know which one it really is. It’s the story, the people telling it, that I am actually interested in. That’s what I really wanted to write about. The fact that the farm is at once a walnut and an olive farm in the family consciousness.

It’s not about finding out Aunt Millie’s real story and writing that. It’s about my grandparents and what they choose to tell me about Aunt Millie and what they choose to hide and what that says about them. It’s not about the novel grandma threw out, its about why she threw it out. It’s about my mother and I like CSI trying to figure out the story behind these old objects. It’s about the story that comes from the story that’s missing.

I don’t know if any of that makes sense but it made a ton of sense to me. Instead of trying to re-imagine the older family member’s lives as I think they lived them, I get to explore their stories as I was told them, which is something I am much more familiar with. I am the kid under the table barely listening to the grown-up talk, I’m the teenager questioning the stories that have suddenly changed, and I’m the adult who figured out long ago that the stories always change and to just enjoy the telling.

Where am I going with this? Well, I have decided to cheat on both my Wife novel (this is what we are calling my original novel) and my Mistress novel with this which we are going to call The Family Project for lack of a better word. It’s a bit more fictional than a memoir because I’m taking some massive liberties (such as cramming events from three Christmases in as if they all happened the same day) but since the title Meeting Millie doesn’t fit anymore, I have nothing else to call it. Though the folder on my computer is still called Meeting Millie which ought to confuse the heck out of me. 🙂

My point is that, I am going to try to contribute a good deal to this new project in 2010. I am not going to write scenes in any particular order. I’m just going to write scenes as I feel like it and hopefully later it will make sense how they go together. If nothing else, it will be a fun thing to have to remember my family with.

I wanted to mentioned all of this background of this project on this blog so I can talk about this project without confusing you but I’m also going to do something I *never* do and actually let you read some of the work in progress. I guess what I want to know is if I am “‘on to something” or if it is all just one big mess.

Oh and if anyone feels like fictionalizing the life of my Aunt Millie with the info above, please be my guest. I am quite sure that even if you do and I later decide to do it myself, they will not be even remotely similar to each other.