As the days go by, there’s time for writing and remembering

The Boston Globe

April 19, 2020

He walks up the stairs from his basement office, sometimes in the early afternoon, sometimes closer to evening, and hands me a few typewritten pages, which have come to be the best part of my day. The pages, two, sometimes three, are stapled together. On page 1 in big, bold letters is always the title, and underneath are the date and his name, Bruce Beckham.

“What was your favorite trip when you were a child?” is what he presents to me today. I sit down, put on my glasses, and read. I’ve heard the story before, of course, but not the whole story. I’ve heard it in bits and pieces, how when he was a kid my husband and his sister went on a trip across the country with his parents, who were escorting a group of senior citizens. I knew that he slept sitting up on the train. And that the older ladies doted on him. And that he visited Washington, D.C., and the Grand Canyon. But I didn’t know it was a three-week trip that began in September. I didn’t know that his parents took his sister and him out of a school they had yet to attend — having just moved to a new town — in order to make the trip. And I would never have known these things if my husband had not written this information down.

Before COVID-19 changed our world — when we could go out and go anywhere at any time — my husband stumbled upon a website, storyworth.com, which asked him questions that made him want to reflect. “You answer one question once a week or whenever you have time and at the end of a year, this website turns your stories into a book,” he told me in December.

I probably shrugged because over the years, a half-century of years, I’ve given him, for Father’s Day, for Christmas, for random occasions, travel journals and personalized memory books. “You don’t have to write every day. Write just once in a while. Write when you feel like writing,” I said. He never wrote.

But then he found this website that hooked him. He signed up and answered four questions in December. But then it was January and he was busy, and then we went away and he was golfing, and when we came home he had all that catching up to do. He didn’t write again until March 9. Until we were hunkered down. Until there was nothing much to do but reflect.

My husband has a water glass with Joe DiMaggio’s picture on it. For years, it lived in a kitchen cabinet with all the other everyday glasses. Until, maybe 10 years ago, when he mentioned that this glass was important to him. I moved it into a dining room cabinet then, and that’s where it’s been since. I always assumed the glass was important because Joe DiMaggio was important, “One of the best baseball players who ever lived,” my husband has told me at least a million times.

What I didn’t know is that when my husband was 12 years old and on what he would one day remember as his favorite childhood trip, he and his family ate at DiMaggio’s Restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf. And it was a big deal. “Joe came from San Francisco. His parents were in the restaurant business and his father, Giuseppe, was a lifelong fisherman,” I read and learned. And learned, too, why his Joe DiMaggio glass remains important.

I find him at his desk these days smiling. “It’s funny,” he says. “I didn’t know I remembered so much. But I sit and I think and things come back.” “What influenced your life in an unexpected way?” And he writes four full pages about golf. It’s his longest essay. “What is one of the greatest physical challenges you have ever had to go through? Who gave you strength?” And he writes, not about having open heart surgery when he was 47, but about having polio when he was 8. And how his mother slept with him “on the scariest, nightmarish times” and how she was his “true hero.” “How did you get to school?” “What was your childhood neighborhood like?” “Which musicians or bands have you seen live?” Every question takes him down memory lane.

He writes and remembers; I read and I learn, giving these aimless, endless days a needed purpose.