Writing a Memoir, One Page at a Time

The Boston Globe

The son, who had grown up listening to his father's stories around the kitchen table, was the one to suggest that his father write a book.

"I could never do that," the father said, the thought of a book, all those words, daunting. "I never liked writing. I was more comfortable with math.”

But he knew he could write a single page.

And so it began. For nearly three years, Roy Marshall, born in Toronto in 1926, sits at his computer Monday mornings and writes to his only grandson, Augustus Roy Marshall (Gus), 15. He writes about books he's read, people he's met, the life he lived as a boy in Canada, and the life he lives now as a husband, father, and grandfather. He writes what is in his heart and what is on his mind. And then he sits back and clicks "send."

He thought, in the beginning, that his grandson would respond with epistles of his own. But Gus is a product of his time and his responses are brief. This does not deter the grandfather. He knows that his letters may be coal now, but that they are diamonds in the making.

Grandfather and grandson do not live miles apart. They live within walking distance of each other. Gus brings his friends to swim in his grandparents' pool. At least once a month he sits with his grandparents at family dinner. They talk. They interact. They see and talk to each other so much that letters might seem redundant. But they are not.

The grandfather begins each with the same salutation: "Listen, The Grey Eagle Speaks." And then he tells a story. Some are reflective. Some instructive. Some serious. Some funny. He has yet to run out of ideas. He says when he sits at his computer, the words flow. He writes about the summer he and his friend Ken, both 12, built a punt, which is a raft with sides. They built it just a block away from Lake Ontario. They used old wood and found nails. Then they dug pitch out of the streets to seal the wood. "We spent every day for weeks working on it." Finally it was launching day.

"My next-door neighbor, Norm, asked to come along. Norm was 7 and couldn't swim. But we brought him anyway and we went out on the lake and it was good but then we started drifting toward the breakwater and all these rocks and we were paddling hard but we couldn't stop ourselves. I yelled, 'Abandon ship!' and we all jumped into the water. Fortunately the lifeguard had already jumped in his rowboat and when Norm came up sputtering, he grabbed him by the hair on his head and pulled him into his boat and rowed him to shore. Ken and I had to swim in.”

The boys went on to building other things. But not before learning that before you do anything, you must always consider the consequences. They worked on a canoe until it was waterproof. They built a music room in the basement of Ken's house. Roy made his own table-tennis table. And created his own Monopoly game with money he hand-printed and houses he cut from balsam wood, then painted. "We didn't have the toys and electronics that children have today. We had to look for things to do.”

"Listen, The Grey Eagle Speaks. Gus, I was intrigued to read of the values George Herbert Walker Bush expressed as a young man, recorded in a letter to his mother. 'Tell the truth. Don't blame people. Be strong. Do your best. Try hard. Forgive. Stay the course.' These are simple propositions, deceptively simple, more easily expressed in words than embodied in one's life. But that is the challenge.”

"Listen, The Grey Eagle Speaks. Gus, you have just celebrated your thirteenth birthday. . . . These teen years can be the best that you have known. . . . As you move through these years you will find choices that you must make that will have a direct bearing on the way that you mature."

"Listen, The Grey Eagle Speaks. Gus, it was the summer of 1975 and I was running the Parkin Architectural Office when I received a call from the Prison Rehab Department asking if we would agree to be in a training program for released criminals. . . . At the end of one year of training he had become a valuable member of the staff.”

Stories, lessons, musings, memories. Diamonds in the rough.

"I could never write a book," Roy Marshall said three years ago. But he has. One page at a time. One e-mail a week.