Chapter 138: You Must Remember This

I recently tried something new with my students that resulted in unintended but revealing consequences. My students are learning to report for narrative, which means taking the skills they already possess – interviewing, collecting documents, observing and listening – and using what they gather to create scenes.

In interviewing for narrative, for instance, the idea is not to push for quotes as you might with a feature, but rather to get subjects to talk in stories, the anecdotes that scenes can be built upon. The scenes, in turn, are the framework through which a drama unfolds.

It is a tricky business: given the sorts of questions reporters tend to ask - “what did you think about what happened…? – people respond to what they believe the reporter wants to hear: an opinion, perhaps, and/or a reflection from the heart: “I thought it was a tragedy. And I hope they catch whoever did it…”

Quotes, in my view, are at their most powerful and useful in a narrative when they supply the emotion that no writer can approximate; after all, only the subject felt as she or he did. When it works, you want to land on a quote – to close a paragraph, say, with the power that only a quote can generate. 

I am of the school of using quotes sparingly for greater effect, though writers I admire disagree and want the voices of the people they interview in the foreground. But either way, in interviewing for a narrative you are working to access memories. 

The process can feel like following someone upstairs to the metaphorical attic and helping them sort through the detritus of a lifetime in search of memory of a moment presumably buried with all the rest that’s accumulated: let me just move grandma’s dresser and see if the photo album is back there…

The idea of the exercise – in keeping with the class project – was to have my students interrogate the frozen moment of a particular photograph and see what memories, and with them what scene or scenes might lay behind them. 

The photo was of me, holding my draft card. 

I had found my draft card in a pile of old papers. I had it mounted and hung it on my office wall, an artifact from a different time. I was 18 in 1970 when like all men my age, I was required to register for the draft. Note the year: America was up to its neck in the bloody quagmire of Vietnam and a high draft number could mean a one-way ticket to the Central Highlands. The best number to get was 365. Fifty or higher all but guaranteed you’d get called up. Mine was 65. A scary number. I was a freshman in college and so had a student deferment. So long as I was in school I could put off the letter ordering me to report for my physical.

I told my students none of this in advance. Find the story, I told them. They began to ask questions.

They asked how I felt. I stepped out of character and suggested they focus on action rather than emotion, the better to search for the most useful, story-building memories. I’d been talking with my students about ways to access memories – asking a lot of small questions and listening carefully to see if there was an opportunity to probe deeper. 

They asked what I did when I opened the letter and saw my number.

I told them I did not remember. This was no lie.

I replied that I suppose I told my parents. I suspect my mother got very upset. I suspect my dad said little. But I could recall nothing specific, certainly no action or dialogue that a scene could be built on.

They pressed and I told them that I vividly remember going to register for the draft several months earlier – taking the subway to the Selective Service office in Coney Island. Only that. Getting off the subway. I believe it was a gray day. 

But the moment the letter arrived, not a thing. 

To their credit they tried a different pathway to what was tucked in the recesses of my brain along with all the other memories that I’d stuffed in there over the intervening fifty years. They asked whether I had any friends who’d gone to Vietnam or were in the military. I did not. They asked whether my friends and I talked about the war and the draft.

And with that they began to nudge the door open.

I told them about working the summer before college as a waiter in a camp and how every night all the waiters, busboys, and sanitation guys gathered to talk about ways to get out of the draft. I remembered how we stood around in the dark and that everyone knew a story of someone who had found a dodge, a cheat. Because we were not going and in our world our parents were not about to let us.

That memory led to another about my parents and their plan: If the war was still going on when I graduated from college they had decided I was going to rabbinical school. 

Or was that the story that had evolved over the years, the story I told myself: they were going to send me to rabbinical school. In Canada. A joke, right? Or maybe that’s what they really had planned for me.

There was no way to check; my parents died years ago. I had given my students the makings of a scene – the nights plotting with my friends on avoiding the draft along with my parents’ plan. 

It was what I remembered. But was it true? Was it really as it happened? Or had I decided a long time ago that this was how I would choose to remember that time? 

Memories are unreliable, as any wise defense attorney knows. But in a journalistic context they are useful, and often essential. Sometimes memories are the only way to capture what once happened. 

There are ways to assess their reliability: you can ask someone else who was present whether they recall things the same way; you can check on the dates, times and places and see if the memory someone has shared with you could have happened as they recalled; you can probe deeper, to make sure you feel confident that what you’re being told feels accurate.

There is, however, a different way to consider memories and that is what I came to understand when the time came for my memories to be probed: it was not necessarily the facts of the memories themselves that was most revealing. 

Rather it was why I had discarded some memories – what I did when I opened the letter – and instead retained the memory of those late night conversations about avoiding the draft, and connecting them with my parents’ scheme to save me.

I’d toyed with the idea of having them write a scene that day – a bit of flash nonfiction. But I decided instead to focus on the reporting. One lesson at a time. But I wonder how it might read. Maybe something like this:

He did not recall opening the letter nor how he and his parents reacted. The summer before he had worked as a camp waiter and fifty years later could still recall the late night conversations with his friends about ways to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Now he had gotten a draft number that threatened to put him in harm’s way as soon as college and with it his student deferment ended. He recalled very little, except for this: a plan his parents laid out – he would go to rabbinical school. Over the years he added a twist – rabbinical school in Canada. His parents were going to keep him safe. How seemed less important than the knowledge that they would. 

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