I save holiday gift wrap and try to re-use it year after year. It’s easier to save and sort the wrapping paper than memories. There’s a methodology to sorting the remaining shapes and sizes that can’t be applied to what we choose to remember or not.

I wish I could sit down at the end of the holidays and sort my memories like the ribbons and ornaments. If I put some of the loose ends together perhaps I could weave them into a whole. What do with the random images? As a writer they are my “pieces of string too short to be saved.”

I know how lucky I am. I get to live, work and write about Ballard. Sunset Hill Community Association allows me to create events for them. I meet new people every week in the course of column and acquire new friends. I get to be curious for a living, and process my observations and neighborhood intrigues. For me finally glimpsing a man changing the sign at Limback’s was akin to spotting Santa Claus.

I could feast for weeks on just exchanges from two separate Solstice parties. At the first event, two guests remarked, separately, upon linking my name with this column, “I thought you’d be taller.” The coincidence of two identical remarks at one event perplexed me. My host later opined that it’s the word “large” in my by-line, readers assume more height, if not girth. After leaving that party there was a spontaneous wedding, performed I might add, by another guest of similar stature. Still how could an unplanned wedding happen in a living room a quarter hour after I’d left the scene?

Give or take the missed wedding, it’s been a rich year in terms of experiences and “leftovers.” So many gifts left on my porch the last ten days, I confess I’ve come to expect treats whenever I open the front door. I can now laugh about the day before property tax was due: I needed to deposit cash in a bank drop and realized I didn’t have an envelope. Could I fashion one from a ripped road map? Sitting on Market Street by the fire station wondering, would it be wrong to call 9-1-1 because the fire light was stuck, the intersections were jammed and the red light camera was flashing continuously? Ordering a 36-pound case of butter just weeks after my father’s stroke; all things I couldn’t work into a column.

Or watching cars pass by pedestrians waiting to cross at unmarked intersections, including a woman so pregnant her belly should have worked as a stop sign. The ten plus cars that passed the blind woman, guide dog and Java Bean employee waiting a few feet off the curb earlier today, even though my daughter and I were making HALT! signs with our hands from either side of our car in the turn lane. Watching pedestrians, often talking on the phone and almost invariably wearing black at night, step off the curb without looking left or right.

Seeing that floating Taj Mahal of a missile defense system lit up like the Magic Kingdom as it passed offshore at dusk on its way to Seattle harbor. Hearing the Ballard Bell ring for the first time while on Market Street. Leaving books for other authors on my front porch as part of our new Ballard Writers’ Lending Library.

Learning how to do a supported shoulder stand in what looks like a toilet seat. Walking home from the Farmer’s Market with root vegetables in both arms and hail hitting my face. A neighbor I’d never met before delivering two boxes of pizza to those of who spent the day planting our new traffic circle. These aren’t just scraps. How to sort and store these memories from the last year?

I will choose my favorite one. My friend Rita Bresnahan sharing from her journal after the Ballard Writers’ Book Slam in November…“And three young girls, 11 or 12, stopped by my table after the readings. “You were our favorite reader.” I thought they must have me mixed up with someone else, and asked if they remembered what my reading was about. “Alzheimer’s” one said.
They proceeded to explain why they liked it: “You made something horrible not so horrible. And we could understand you.”

Twenty-two readers and three girls approached a 79 year-old woman with their highest compliment. Since that event even more literary and non-literary connections have been made and Rita’s book, “Walking One Another Home: Moments of Grace & Possibility in the Midst of Alzheimer’s” has enjoyed a resurgence in sales at Secret Garden.

All the positive things that have resulted from connecting more people with one another, trying to weave together all that I want to save from the last year finally gives me a response to those who said, “I thought you’d be taller.” Watching Rita look at her book in the window along with those of other Ballard Writers at Secret Garden makes me channel Margaret Atwood when I say, “I am taller.”

Please see http://www.ballardwriters.org and contact me if you are a Ballard writer interested in participating. Atlargeinballard@yahoo.com