Reflection: 1000 Words of Summer June 17-30

I interrupt this narrative to bring you a possibly (un)important announcement

Welcome again to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. I know this is supposed to be a memoir about the 1990s and here I am digressing again with a reflection on the present. Bear with me, I have 1996 and 1997 all mapped out and will return after this brief intermission.

And if there is anyone else you would like to tell about what you’ve been reading here, please feel free to share this link to everything that I have written on Substack.

---

When asked what I “do,” I sometimes reply, “I drive for a living.” Itʻs a joke of course. Neither Uber nor Lyft has drivers in rural Kohala. Itʻs a joke that I find funny/not funny because my day job as a real estate broker requires me to do a lot of driving, and I have become rather cranky about it in the past three years.

My pandemic story is not that different than the stories of many other people I know in Hawaiʻi. People I loved were lost to the virus. People I love lost people they loved to the virus, their dominoes of grief collapsing onto mine. Children I love struggled, cut off from their routines and from live play with their friends. Adults I love found themselves without jobs. But the Hawaiʻi that I love thrived.

Hawaiʻi without the millions of tourists that on an annual basis form a transient population exceeding the number of residents more than four times over, that Hawaiʻi was a marvel, a throwback of vitality and aloha. From six feet apart we relished the emptiness of beaches and the free time to reclaim our place on them. We savored the calm of rural streets where drivers slow to look each other in the eyes as they pass, throwing a shaka or even a hula-gestured kiss with nary an impatient tourist honking to object. Entrepreneurship flourished, as did our solidarity and the ways our communities have of caring collectively for their own.

---

On the evening before the first day of pandemic lockdown I turned off the alarm on my bedside clock and stopped worrying about tight schedules and drive time to appointments and showings.

The next morning I picked up a writing project I began in 2002.

I read. I wrote. I edited. I hired two different editors to give me their critical opinions on my writing and its marketability. I rediscovered my passion for writing.

---

Now that the pandemic is officially cancelled, I once again ferry maskless families from home to home, from condo to condo, from Keauhou to Kawaihae. I put my 4-Runner in 4-Wheel Low and bump along trails through steeply sloping pastures, getting out in my jeans and boots to bushwhack through buffalo grass and windbreaks of ironwood trees in search of a fluttering of pink plastic tape marking staked corners of a large parcel of land for sale. Then I change into colorful, skimpy “resort wear” and drive to oceanfront restaurants to network with lenders and treat potential clients and current clients and past clients to lunch or cocktails.

And even as I track thousands of miles each month on my mileage app, during those rare peaceful unhurried times I am alone in the car, I find myself switching off the sounds of KEWE 97.9 FM whose broadcast floats across the ʻAlenuihāhā Channel from Maui, so I can listen better to whatever is writing itself in my head. A real estate blog post for the Hawaiʻi Life website. A long email response to a client or community member. The next installment of this memoir on Substack. The incessant and sometimes tiresome internal narration of my day to day life, my grudges and grumbles, my dreams and crushes, my perceived or real problems and their imagined solutions.

I am obsessed with words. I talk too much, listen too little. I think a lot about how words shape our worlds, how the structure of language allows some to see what others canʻt - and prevents most of us from seeing what some can.

The more I write, the more I obsess about writing well. Who has time for social media or television when there are so many amazing writers on Substack? Each brilliantly worded essay I read inspires me to want to be That Damn Good.

To challenge myself to get better at writing, to find new words and new ways of using words, I decided to participate in the fifth year of #1000wordsofsummer, a project that last year was joined by more than 15,000 writers committing to write 1,000 words a day for fourteen days, honing their craft together.

I have something I want to write about, a new topic I am eager to explore. In the longer days of summer, I rise early and have that extra hour of sunlight during which I can make a start on a thousand words or so if I just keep my fingers typing. But to commit to write 1,000 word a day about a different topic means I will need to push the pause button on They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir for a couple of weeks.

It is possible that I will share some of that writing here, either during the two weeks or at the end. Meanwhile, I need the freedom to explore this new topic without anyone looking over my shoulder to read it. Recently Substack Reads turned me on to a conversation between two young writers, Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez. This quotation is what inspired me to dig into my new topic at a level that I am not (yet) ready to share:

Suleika on advice to herself

If you want to write a good book, write what you don’t want others to know about you. “If you want to write a great book, write what you don’t want to know about yourself.”

I want to believe I have a great book in me. I have no idea whether what I am writing here, or what I will write between June 17 and June 30, 2023, will become that great book. All I can do is sit down at my desk every day and write until my inner judge, critic and censor finally look away and I spill the beans to myself. Then I can decide if I am ready to share it with you.

I will be back. A hui hou dear readers. Please read some really good writing somewhere today. And tomorrow. And the day after that.

Beth