Anita's Notebook &#187; jody wirawan

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

Jennifer Hint Memoir Month

A Birthday Over Grass (Hint Memoir)

Anita — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:44:30 +0000

With pinwheel and striped roses over raised letter, she carefully laid the presents under the sun.

This was the first time, though not the last.

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

Jennifer Hint Memoir Month

Picking Cars (Hint Memoir)

Anita — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:58:24 +0000

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

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

Jennifer Hint Memoirs

Anita — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 21:07:10 +0000

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 :).

From Alaska To Jakarta: A Birthday Cache For Jody

Anita — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 02:06:04 +0000

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.

We chose a souvenir from Jakarta as the item for the travel bug, it’s a hand made keychain that has a picture of old-town Jakarta on one side:

and Jody’s name on the other side:

A CACHE FOR JODY

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.

Elijah was really cool about it and got the ball rolling by giving us a cache and some prizes to put in it.

Strange thing, the first cache he picked up had the letters JW (which are Jody’s initials) in stickers on the inside of it.

Now we had to find a place to hide the cache. So Jennifer, Elijah, his two kids, and I set off for an afternoon in the snowy woods to look for a good spot.

It was a little cold out…

…but we had fun anyway :)

We trudged through the deep snow and finally found a spot we thought was perfect.

It’s out of the way but won’t be impossible for people to find.

After finding the spot the first step is to start the GPS so that we can have coordinates to help people navigate to the cache.

And while the GPS triangulates we …er …actually Elijah hides the cache.

Now that the cache is safely hidden the stage is set for geocachers to seek it out.

We had lots of fun hiding the cache. But it was only a small adventure compared to the one we hope Jody’s travel bug will have on it’s way to reaching it’s ultimate goal: visiting Jakarta, Indonesia.

Mario And Luigi (Hint Memoir)

Anita — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 12:30:51 +0000

Today’s hint memoir is about my little brother Jody. His birthday is today, he would have been twenty-five years old.

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

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

Cemetery Trees After Sprinklers (Hint Memoir)

Anita — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 12:29:13 +0000

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.

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

One Armed Vet (Hint Memoir)

Anita — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 08:58:19 +0000

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

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

The Whisper Of Cottonwoods

Anita — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:31:59 +0000

I love the imagery in this poem. It’s amazing how a story as small as a few sentences can take you from the chair you’re sitting in and immerse you in abstract, seemingly impossible dimensions. And all the while telling truths about life, death.

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 (Hint Memoir)

Anita — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:30:38 +0000

JCPenney

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

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