Vignettes

Once we had completed it, however, we took a long look and decided that what we had just written might better serve as an introduction to the whole three-volume New York set. Therefore, that’s where you will find it—right after these "perfunctory notes."

Then, we wrote another conclusion. That second conclusion is now placed at the end of volume three, which is (obviously) the last book of the New York series.

With the beginning and the end established, all that was left was to fill in the details.
We decided that our next step would be to establish the chapter headings. The first chapter heading meeting was held at a third coffee house—Beaner’s (later to be called Biggby Coffee). We quickly observed that of the three places, Beaner’s had the best background music (they usually played Classic Blues); but sported the loudest patrons, wielding the most offensive cell phones. We determined that if we were to continue working in public places, we would have to train ourselves to shut out all distracting sights and sounds. We found that with some effort, we could force our minds to be virtually impervious to all outside stimuli. I think the raising of four children helped us with that. At any rate, as long as Beaner’s could make our double espressos with whipped cream, we could get fired up there, just as we could at the other locations.

The first night of "chapter heading writing" we rapidly arrived at one

hundred within the first twenty minutes. We found it very easy to remember events from those New York years. After we reached one hundred on that the first night, we decided to come back the next night to see if we could come up with another fifty or so. We thought that one hundred and fifty chapter headings would be adequate; besides, we didn’t think it possible to come up with many more than that.

We also decided during that first session that a better term to describe our current activity would be "vignette selection." At that stage, vignettes sounded more palatable to us than chapters, even though that’s what they were eventually to become.

The next night of vignette selection, we went to a new coffee shop. This one was called "Common Ground"—a community extension of a nearby church. We really liked this place, except for the very noisy digital chess timers. Common Ground was a throwback to the early 1960s. It reminded me greatly of the beatnik coffee houses that were prevalent in Greenwich Village during the pre-hippie era—but without the heroin, of course. Lenny Bruce might have felt almost at home there. Common Ground was a fun place to work, and they knew how to make exceptional espressos with whipped cream. Life was good.

This second night of vignette selection was also very fruitful. We quickly reached our target fifty, and kept going. With only a half-hour invested, we had reached one hundred. We sped past that number with an ounce left in our cups. By the time we finished our espressos, we had logged over two hundred

We took a few minutes to talk about how many chapters we actually wanted to include in the book. We reviewed our list of three hundred and decided that they were all worth consideration, if not inclusion. We decided to continue with these vignette selection meetings until we started to run out of potential topics. We concluded that when it happened (when it became difficult to come up with new vignettes), we would know that the well was running dry and that it was time to close out this part of the project.

The problem was, as long as we sat down with those double espressos, we just kept coming up with more vignettes. We never slowed down. "How many chapter headings could a little book accommodate?"

After a few more sessions, we hit seven hundred. We agreed that was a good number, and that we should quit seeking more. We concluded that we had listed all the best topics, and that if we kept squeezing the life out of those four years, the last drops would not contain anything sexy. We did make one concession in this regard—if a new topic were to shout out at us along the way, we could include it if we wished; otherwise, we would stick with the original seven hundred.

With the introduction and conclusion in place, and with a list of seven hundred potentially viable chapter headings in hand, we embarked on the hard work of actually writing the book.

When it came down to putting flesh on the skeleton, we weren’t quite sure how we should go about it. Would it be best to first discuss an event in detail, and then come up with a common version? Or should we each take a vignette and write about it independently? Evie was strongly against the former. She believed that we each should bring a laptop, discuss the title of the vignette only to the point that we were sure we were on the same event, and then develop our own accounts.

We still weren’t sure if that was the best way to do it, but we did think that it would at least be a good way to get started. We decided to do it like this: We would be sure that we both understood the vignette in question. Then, we would each take whatever time we needed to record our take on that vignette. After we were both finished, we would exchange flash drives, and each read the other’s writing. We agreed from the start never

to be critical, and never to edit the each other’s work. It was great fun.

At first we devoted two evenings each week to the endeavor. We were initially content with that regimen. But then we calculated just how long (at that rate) this project would take us to complete.

We decided to up the ante to four evenings each week—Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We contented ourselves with that schedule even though it still seemed to stretch the project out over an inordinate amount of time. After we were about two years into the effort, we increased it to five nights each week.

Not wanting to watch each other’s face wrinkle over cups of pre-publication doppio con pannas, for a while we tried doing two vignettes each session. We quickly found that we were not capable of doing that, so we dropped back down to one per writing session.

At that rate, we began to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel—we were completing five chapters per week.

However, all did not go entirely well. After about a half-dozen writing sessions we discovered that something really very exciting (verging on troubling) was happening. While we would always write about the same vignette on any given night, our recollection of the events associated with that vignette could be very different—sometimes disturbingly so.

At first I was totally surprised. "What in the world is she thinking?" I would ask myself. "That’s not the way

But then I would think about it more objectively (I have to admit that it was tricky for me to be totally objective, because I would have just finished writing my own version of that same vignette). Even though I did not always agree with her version, in every case I could still get my mind wrapped around it well enough to appreciate it. It was clear that she was recording events as honestly as she possibly could; it was just that she had a different take on them.

Even more interestingly, it seemed obvious to me that she had not just come up with her views on these past events; she had developed them over the years. When I would question her about it, she would be adamant. When her version differed from mine, Evie truly believed her recollections were right, and that mine were wrong. She was not being stubborn—she was honestly convinced.

I knew that I could not change her mind, had that even been my intention. I also knew that I was convinced that my versions were the more correct. I questioned these disparities, even asking myself whether or not we should attempt to reconcile them.

Then, I recalled the concept behind the old psychological parlor game called "Telephone." Most of us have played some variation of that game at parties, or acted it out in a classroom. The basic concept of the game is to demonstrate the unintentional distortion of a story as it is retold through a chain of people.

In that game, the first person reads a written message to a second person, and the second person repeats aloud the story from memory to a third. This process is repeated until the message has passed orally through a dozen or more people. The last person in the chain writes the message down, and then the final version is compared to the original. Invariably, the two versions of the same message bear little similarity. It is comically entertaining to see how dramatic the differences are between the two.

In the case of the writing of our book, while the stories that Evie and I tell are not subjected to numerous retellers, they have been molded by thirty-eight years of retelling; howbeit if only in our minds.

 

"The difference between false memories and the true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real,

the most brilliant." —Salvador Dali