...And your point is?

The following is an excerpt from what currently exists of my thesis, all six pages of creative non-fiction goodness (In answer to your question yes, I've decided to take the memoir route and see where it leads me). This excerpt is from a very rough draft, but I am not going to pick it to death trying to make it "perfect" before I let you read it. And I have a reason for that.

Catalina Island is primarily a tourist destination and a vacation spot; that is to say, few people actually live, work, and go to school there 365 days a year, but rather come out for a day, a week, perhaps an entire summer, but never a lifetime. Most of Catalina is barren grassland anyway, a floating mass of hills and dry scrubby plant life and plains inhabited by buffalo, so it’s not as though the two tiny inlets of developed civilization could inhabit a very large year-round community anyway. Avalon’s not a very big town, and Two Harbors is even smaller.

Because this is the case, the City of Avalon tries to keep traffic to a minimum – there’s very little place for traffic to go, and even if there was, to cram the tiny town full of noisy cars would totally take away its quiet charm and destroy its sense of peaceful isolation from mainstream society. So instead of traveling by car, anyone who’s not a permanent resident or a taxi driver (which is almost everyone) gets around the island by golf cart. As a result, I was unaware for the longest time that golf carts were actually used primarily in the sport of golf, because for most of my life, Catalina was the only place I’d ever ridden a golf cart, and so it became in my mind a magical vehicle used to transport me around my favorite place on earth.

I got so excited when we were finally settled in and unpacked, and the time came for us to venture out of our condo by way of this amazing golf cart. My brother and I would sprint ahead of our parents in a race to see who could reach it first. (There was always a discrepancy in our judgment of this “sport” – yes, I had, technically, arrived next to the golf cart before Scott had, but he was the first one to touch it. Then I was the first one to sit in it. He was the first to buckle his seat belt. We almost never could agree on who the ‘winner’ really was. )

When we had finished our debate, we would sit buckled into the cart’s rear-facing backseats, watching the road that meandered by and waving to the occupants of the other carts that would occasionally hum past, waiting for mom and dad to gather up cell phones, sunglasses, wallets, purses, condo keys, cart keys, and the scrap of paper on which they’d scribbled the phone numbers of all the aunts’ and uncles’ condos. They always turned going out into such a lengthy process, even when it was only for a quick trip like this one to the grocery store, so my brother and I often found ourselves waiting around while they dawdled.

See, I'm trying this new thing now. I'm trying, really hard, to just let go and write. I'm even trying to limit the amount of time I spend re-reading and nit-picking it at this point. I figure that since my goal in undertaking this project is to tell the story of one of the most important - and most fun - parts of my childhood, then to let my inner critic run wild would be to hinder my thoughts and emotions really getting to flow. When I actually stop and think about it, it makes a lot more sense to just to get everything out of my head and onto the page, and THEN start trying to make it sound good. This may seem like a "no duh!" revelation, but it's something I'm constantly struggling with. So that's my goal now, to give myself more freedom in my process by trying not to be such a control freak over myself.

That said, I think I've also figured out (sorta, almost) what I'm trying to accomplish with this piece. The way I've told it, it sounds simple: there was this fun thing I did every summer growing up, and I want to write about it. But that's only one piece of the puzzle. I've figured out that my real hope for this undertaking is a bit more complex than that. What I really want to do is:

1.) Show the beauty of a place that is so important to me, and show WHY it is important to me.

but more importantly...

2.) Focus on the Family: this is, I think, what this whole thing is really about. I have all these family members - 28 to be exact - that I only see once, maybe twice a year, because they all live 600 miles away at the other end of the state. And most of them live relatively close to each other, so they all see each other a lot more than I ever see any of them. And I've realized I have this whole half a family (this is just my dad's side, I see my mom's people all the time) that I feel like I barely know, who barely get to be a part of my life. And it bums me out a bit, because as I've gotten older, I've come to see just what wonderful people most of them are, and how much I'm missing out on by not getting to invest in my relationships with them as much as I'd like to, as much as everyone else gets to. I suppose I feel left out.

Anyway, I didn't see it like this when I was young, but I can see it now, the way that our annual trips to Catalina Island were what kept our family relationships strong. Even those folks who live near each other get so busy all the time that they don't always see much of each other, and when they do, it can tend to feel rushed. I know when we go to visit, it always feels rushed trying to cram everyone into a few days. That was what was so nice about our Catalina time. There was no rushing. Everybody got to relax and enjoy everyone else's company, to hang out in the pool or the hot-tub together, to chat over drinks, to go snorkeling, shopping, dining, to just love being there and talking and laughing without feeling like we had to fit it all in before the time ran out. And although we don't take these trips anymore, and we're back to those rushed visits (and the occasional wedding now that the cousins are growing up!) I realize that my relationships with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were fostered by the time we spent together on that island, and the groundwork was laid for the relationships that are continuing on now into my young adult years. I think THAT is the real core of the story I am trying to tell.

Okay, now I'm sentimentalizing, and you're probably all getting bored with me. But this little blogging session just now has been good for me, because it's helped me to clarify what I'm really aiming for, and re-think what's really important to me.

Now, to try getting all those feelings out on paper... I could really go for a Catalina Island Strawberry Daquiri right now!