So for creative writing we had to do a hw assignment where we wrote "I remember" statements about a specific thing, or from a specific point of view etc. in which we used the "idiosynchratic detail". To those non-english majors out there, here is what that is. If I were to describe a car, saying that it was a "vehicle" would be general. Saying that it was a "car" would be more specific. Saying that it was a "Bright green honda element with a broken fender from when you backed into the garage door" would be the idiosynchratic detail. Anyways....here is what I wrote for mine:
I remember hearing about how even though he lost the better use of his left leg to polio when he was nine years old, my father’s uncle Al would walk up what was now known as the neighborhood’s best sledding hill on his hands to visit his grandparents who lived at the top. So that he wouldn’t feel bad about not being able to walk properly, his 7 brothers walked on their hands as well whenever they were with him. They would walk along the lake-road and into town without using their legs, or at least walk as far as it took for someone to stop and offer them a ride.
I remember how my sisters and I would sit at the plastic dining room table and spoon canned corn out the door while the raccoons crowded around it and Sylvia, my uncle’s girlfriend, fed us lemonade Capri-Sun’s and Reece’s Peanut Butter cups while we laughed at the raccoons licking the corn off the cement steps and at the thirty five pound cat who slept on the armchair because she was too fat to walk.
I remember hearing stories about how he always brought the most beautiful women to the family Christmas parties at the Fire Hall. He wasn’t tall, had a bad leg, walked with a limp and with a cane in his 20‘s, and worked as a Volkswagen repairman in his shop on the town pier. My aunt said she never understood how he got these women to go out with him, who she swore all looked like Vogue models.
I remember how we would always trick or treat at his house on Halloween. We were his only trick-or-treaters, yet he would still have a plastic orange bowl full of pretzels, Hershey’s chocolate bars and lollipop’s with white sugar skull’s printed on them. He would always bark at us to take more, while my mom stood in the doorway and chastised us for being so greedy and my dad ate all the Hershey bars.
I remember him telling me as he lay in his bed and I stood in the doorway because his room was too small for another person to stand in that having cancer was the best diet he had ever been on. “I’ve lost about 20 pounds in two months!” he would say, holding out his arm to show us how skinny he was. Then he would tell us how his doctors were allowing him to drink wine, and then gesture to his dresser top where five bottles of it sat next to a basket of socks. “I never was a drinking man,” he said, “but now I don’t mind it so much. They tell me I should drink about half a glass a day, so I do. One in the morning and one at night.”
I remember hearing that when he repaired VW bug’s in his shop on the pier, he would listen to classical music, and he would have visitors or customers tell him about whatever they knew, whether it be a dissertation on Bach or a rant about the Zebra muscle problem in the lake.
I remember knowing that he knew he was going to die the day he gave my 8 year old sister a 1980’s model of VW beetle with doors that opened and a steering wheel that made the wheels move. I remember knowing that my dad knew it too, because he didn’t eat dinner that night.
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