‘What car should I pick?’ he asked. It was then that I knew for sure he liked her.

 

Jennifer Hint Memoir Month

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

Just a quick note, since Jennifer’s birthday is in March I’m going to make all the hint memoirs for this month related to her somehow :).

Today is Jody’s birthday, he would have been twenty-five years old. Jennifer and I thought for a long time about what to do in honor of his birthday this year, and she came up with something very unusual that Jody would have really loved.


JAKARTA

Traveling was really important to Jody. As he reached adulthood he was thrilled to have the opportunity to freely travel the U.S. and even see different countries as part of his work.

He planned on doing a lot more travelling after he got out of the Army and ultimately wanted to go to Jakarta, Indonesia to visit the city where he was born.

Jakarta was a completely foreign concept to Jody and he often wondered about it when he was growing up. It was an interesting part of his story that stood out, so people always asked him, ‘What’s it like in Jakarta? or ‘Can you say something in Indonesian for us?’ But he had no memories of his life there.

Because he was still in the Army at the time he wasn’t able to take the big trip to Jakarta with Jennifer and I in 2008. But during his first phone call to me afterwards he was full of questions and happy but tentative excitement about this part of his history finally being within reach.


THE TRAVEL BUG

In honor of Jody’s love for travel Jennifer came up with the (really awesome) idea of putting something that’s called a ‘travel bug’ out in his honor.

A travel bug is a fun thing in geocaching that’s basically an object that you put out that travels all over the country or the world via other people that play geocaching.

You put the travel bug in a cache and someone takes it to another cache, and in this way travel bugs go all over the world step by step. You can track it’s progress online and also see any stories people have left about their adventures of moving it to a new cache. And you can even set specific goals of different places you’d like the travel bug to visit.

When Jennifer first told me about her idea I knew it was perfect and something that Jody would have totally loved.

But now that Jennifer and I had the travel bug we needed to come up with a cache to put it in. No cache seemed just right so we decided to create a brand new cache in memory of Jody and have his travel bug start out it’s journey there.

Though we’d both done a lot of geocaching neither of us had ever started or hid a cache before, so we asked our friend Elijah to help us since he knows all about that kind of thing.

That game made him laugh like he had no problems in the world. I wish I could play again.

 

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

When the wind blew it looked like the trees were shivering off water and the sun shone through each drop as it hit the grass.

 

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

The one armed vet tipped the candy machine slightly. ‘There you go,’ he said.

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

This poem is on my mind a lot right now, the time of year when my brother Jody died.

 

The Family Silence

by Debora Greger

A hill came out of nowhere.
My dead brother said nothing;
he never did. Where was he leading me?

Up. On a night this clear, you could see
the broken bracelet of some small town
scattered at our feet. The little beads

of headlights came unstrung,
rolled down a black ribbon of river.
Sixty years of silence had turned his voice

to the whisper of cottonwoods.
You’re right: you don’t want to come back
until you’re dead, he said,

who’d died at birth. Then everything looks new.
The family silence trail at my heels,
doggedly sniffing other silences.

Did the man my brother had never grown into
slip through the slick streets?
The sound of footfalls turned to rain

and came out dry.

JCPenney

‘I could have so much money if it weren’t for you.’ my mother said to us on the way home from JCPenney.

 

 

What is a hint memoir?

More hint memoirs.

Feel free to post your own hint memoirs in the comments too if you want I’d love to read em :).
 

 

This is an ongoing project to make a directory of links to biographies and memorials, with a focus on pages about and maintained by private individuals.

The idea for this directory came when I was working on a memorial site for my brother Jody. While looking for inspiration and ideas I noticed that it was really hard to find biographies/memorials of people who weren’t famous and weren’t maintained by a 3rd party site. (Nothing against memorials maintained by 3rd party sites, they just have a different style than what I was looking for.)

This project is still in it’s beginning stages and is something I’ll be working on in my spare time. As I find more sites they will be added to the top of the list to make it easier to check back and see the newest ones. If you have a site you’d like to see on this list please use this contact form to submit it.

Dan Bartolaba Memorial Blog

Jenny Anne Doenges Memorial

Jody Michael Wirawan Memorial And Biography