In Six Words

Sometimes I find my heart on someone else's page. It's like coming face to face with a stranger I know so well; it's like having someone else introduce me to myself.

Check out this excerpt from Signs of Life, by Natalie Taylor. She has me thinking in six-word increments.

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I decide to wander through Borders bookstore for a while. I find a book called, "Not Quite What I Was Planning."

Smith magazine invited its subscribers to submit their own six-word memoirs. The book was inspired by an Ernest Hemingway Line: "Baby shoes: for sale, never worn." Hemingway proved that an entire story could be told in six words.

The book is amazing. It's funny and sad. I want to meet all of the people behind the quips.

"I'm ten and have an attitude."

"I still make coffee for two."

"Accidentally killed cat. Fear anything delicate."

One of my personal favorites: "Birth, childhood, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence."

Of course I think about my life in six words. What would it be? What six words would summarize the insanity of the last year of my life, let alone the first twenty-four?

What first comes to mind is "Single widowed mother trying to recover."

But then, I reason, if I only had six words, would I choose the word widow? Would I allow that word to make up my identity? Just a half-dozen words to describe everything I've been through - would widow make the team?

If I wanted to be as descriptive as possible, then certainly widow does explain a lot.

I am a widow, at least in title.

But after reading through some more six-word memoirs, I decide that if I only had six words, I wouldn't take widow.

"The female version of Indiana Jones."

That's not mine, that's an entry on p. 29. It's brilliant. I want to be friends with that girl. Maybe she's a widow too and she just decided that her adventurous spirit was more important than her marital status.