Memory and History: What do we really remember?

“I don’t recall.”

“I don’t remember.”

“If you give me a minute, I might be able to think it up.”

“Not that I can recall just now, no.”

“I refuse to answer that.”

Me:  ANSWER THE F-ING QUESTIONS ALREADY, YOU BLEEPING BLEEP BLEEP!

No, I didn’t travel into the future and bring back the transcript of Donald Trump’s treason trial – though if I had, I’d also (spoiler alert!) tell you he’d been found guilty. No. This? This is a micro-sample of what I encountered this week, slogging through the deposition of the man who claimed to be George Kimmel.

Any wonder why I started writing OMFG on nearly every page?!

If you don’t remember (hah), George Kimmel disappeared without a trace in 1898. For the past ten years, I’ve been researching his disappearance. Why ten years, you ask? Well! See, the case went to trial several times over a decade, because there were several life insurance policies, and because every time one court made a decision, an appeal was filed the next day by the losing side. It dragged on until, I think, 1917 – and part of the reason it dragged on for-ev-er was because of this guy. This claimant. Whose real name I don’t even know.

All I know is, he was NOT freaking George Kimmel.

In the very first episode of the Serial podcast, Sarah Koenig discusses the problem of memory. Can you recall a day six years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you? Who were your friends? Where did you work? Did you work on that particular day? This is often the problem with solving cold cases – or any cases, for that matter. How can you prove that what you think happened, really happened? Today, we could probably check our Facebook pages, or Twitter. But what if I asked you to recall a day before social media? Could you do it?

That’s the problem I face with this case. Some memories are good. Some are not. Some can’t be trusted. Can any of them be trusted? Who’s telling the truth? And that’s why I have to keep an open mind, even when my knee-jerk reaction is to throw everything The Claimant says out the window.

The dude’s totally infuriating. He spent most of his time either refusing to answer questions, claiming he didn’t remember things he bloody well ought to have remembered, or arguing with the attorneys. How many times did he say “I don’t remember,” or some variation thereof, you ask? My best guess is somewhere around 80-90% of the time. The Claimant claimed that it was because he was hit on the head and thus his memory was impaired. Well, he was hit on the head, that’s true. In fact, he wasn’t just hit on the head; from the description, someone tried to take his head off, possibly with an ax. Having read 657 pages of the claimant’s testimony, I am in complete sympathy with that person.

I think anyone who’s seen a few episodes of Matlock would probably join me in saying, after just a few pages, that this guy is a total fraud. Some things, he’s completely lucid and detailed about – for instance, the crazy story he tells about being kidnapped in Kansas City and held hostage in St. Louis. He can recall that with perfect detail. No problem whatsoever. But ask him to identify people in photos, people he ought to know, like his family? He can’t – and won’t – do it. In fact, at one point, the bum even turned his head away and refused to look at them. The things he should know, he doesn’t. The things he does know, are things that were either published in the papers and readily available, or are things that he has made up in his own mind.

And yet. This deposition was taken in 1908 – ten years after George disappeared. Can you remember what you were doing ten years ago? In 2010, I was an adjunct instructor. I was in my first year of teaching for Newman University, and my work load was really picking up. I think that was the year I taught for Butler, too. That was the year I got my cat Angel. But as for specifics? Students in my classes, books I read? You do it. See how far you get. Because I can only give you generalities.

Big ticket items, we tend to remember. I will always know that 2019 was the year I saw Hamilton live. Just like I will always know that 2020 was the year that the entire world went to hell in a handcart. But ask me to get more specific than that . . . and without some frame of reference, I don’t think I could do it. So why do I – and why do these attorneys – think The Claimant should be able to do it?

A proverbial Catch-22.

Do I believe he’s George Kimmel? No. Absolutely not. For starters, they look nothing alike. See here:

The one on the left is The Claimant. The one on the right, George Kimmel. The nose, the eyes, everything is different. Even their eye colors are different! The Claimant has gray-blue eyes; Kimmel, dark brown.

If I didn’t know this story as well as I do, if I hadn’t read hundreds of newspaper articles and studied the earlier trials, I might be swayed by his arguments. I might say, “But look! He knows all of this stuff! And of course the men who kidnapped him are going to keep quiet about it!”

BUT. I have to admit, there are moments that give me pause. Things I can’t quite explain away – except by remembering that The Claimant is a con artist, and this is a con.

For starters, he clearly lived in St. Louis at some point, or was being fed information about the city by one of the lawyers, for he could pinpoint streets and intersections and locations that actually did exist in 1898. And there are other things, things that aren’t quite as well known, things he would either have to know, or have to have learned from someone. In the deposition, for example, he finally says that his grandmother’s names are Desire (pronounced, I believe, Desiree, but spelled Desire in the parish register and in his testimony), and Ethelina. Seriously, NO ONE could make those names up! And what about the fact that he says (after a great deal of back and forth and refusals) that his paternal grandfather lived on Hickory Lane – and he did? 

Those are the kinds of things that throw me for a loop, every time.

I want to get to the truth. I want to remain unbiased. But I’m not. No historian is, not really. No writer is. I have never known what to think about this story. I have never truly been able to form an opinion about what happened to George Kimmel. I have half a dozen theories, each as realistic and probable as the others. But what I do not think is that The Claimant is him. I believe he’s nothing more than a con artist. A good one, but a con artist nonetheless. Because this is how con artists work. Pick out a few key, important details . . . stand fast behind a facade of “I don’t have to prove anything to you,” and “I don’t remember” . . . and voila! You’re someone else, and no one can quite prove you’re not – especially in an age where fingerprints weren’t even in use yet, and DNA, for all we knew, didn’t even exist. (In case you’re wondering, fingerprints were actually first used to solve a crime in 1892, in Argentina. But in America, the first case that used them to convict someone wasn’t until 1910.) And even if someone had thought to use fingerprints – where could they have gotten a sample of George’s? By 1908, when this deposition was taken, all of his belongings were back in Niles, possibly in storage, possible destroyed, possibly scattered. There was no way to control that sample. No lawyer worth his salt would have allowed that into evidence!

Which, I had to remind myself repeatedly by page 400 or so, was precisely what the claimant was doing. Wear down the lawyers. Wear down the family. Wear down the idiotic historian who decided 100 years later to become obsessed with the case. You know. This is what con artists do. 

And yet . . .

Even I can’t quite shake the doubts.

 

If you’ve never heard Serial before, OMG, where have you been? A link to Season One:  https://serialpodcast.org/season-one

For more information on that first case of fingerprint use, see:  https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/a-bloody-fingerprint-elicits-a-mothers-evil-tale-in-argentina

And for more information on the first American case:  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-case-where-fingerprints-were-used-evidence-180970883/

When the world gets turned upside down . . . by a kitten

Three weeks ago, Mum totally upended our lives. 

We were living the good life. We were the babies! Every morning, Mum would feed us and love on us, and call us handsome and sweet and rotten. Sing to us, even – ‘Maximus Imperius, your name is Maximus Imperius, and there’s a million things you haven’t done .  . .” or “Dear Tiny Baby, what to say to you, you have my eyes, you have your mother’s name . . .”* Every night, she’d kiss us goodnight at bedtime. We Ruled. 

Now? Now, it’s all over. Gone. Evaporated. Demolished completely by a tiny tabby Caligula named – of all things – Hamilton. Hamilton!? How dare she? He gets the kisses. He gets to curl up on her lap and go to sleep. He has no rules. He gets to turn our world upside down. And all because he came home with stitches . . . 

I admit it. Over the past few weeks, all of my cats have issued a statement along these lines. They vary, of course. Maximus and Tiny, being my Baby Fiends, have always been the babies, ever since they were born almost five years ago. To them, having a kitten in the house is a disruption on a scale approaching the eruption of Pompeii. For the older cats, who have seen kittens come and grow up and stay, I was on the receiving end of eye rolls and long-suffering sighs.

However, after nearly a month, things seem to be settling somewhat.

So . . . meet Hamilton. AKA, Hammie, Ham Baby, the Ham-meister, Itty Bitty Baby Hammie.

All my cats come to me in unusual ways. Beth and Angel were rescues from a former friend. Rascal was chased into my barn by a skunk (I saw this tiny ball of fluff zoom straight at me and skid to a stop behind my legs, the skunk in hot pursuit!). Maximus and Tiny were abandoned at birth by their mother. Sassy was dropped off by aliens. You know. But Hammie may have the most unusual story. This is Ham about four hours after I first heard him crying:

Yes, that’s barbed wire. I heard him crying on my walk one morning, and spent three hours searching before I found him behind my neighbor’s house. I thought he was lost in their hayfield, so I knocked on the door and asked if I could go search. They said yes, so I took off. After a few minutes, I found this tiny tabby clinging to a wooden fence post, and quickly realized that he’d somehow become impaled on the barbed wire fence. Thankfully, my neighbor came to find me a little bit later and was even more gracious when she let me cut the fence to get him out – that took an hour; nota bene, barbed wire is double-strand woven and TOUGH. Ham had surgery to remove the wire that afternoon.

A week later, he developed infection in the site, and had to have a second surgery. He was hurt; he was frustrated; he was scared. The stitches made the leg stiff, and he sort of ‘doodle-bugged’ around in circles on it for a day or two before he was able to start walking on it properly. Terrified that the other cats would think he was a legit target, I only let him out on supervised outings at first. I was overjoyed when he finally started to PLAY!!! Although, as you can see, Maximus Imperius was not overjoyed. At all.

We aren’t out of the woods yet; last weekend he hit bottom with a massive infection and had an emergency vet run. He’s still on two different antibiotics, but he’s continuing to grow – at approximately 10 weeks, he’s already over 3lbs! – and hopefully we will get him healed up soon.

Since I know a few questions may be running through your mind right now, I’ll try to answer them (nope, I’m not psychic; these are the questions I’ve been asked repeatedly over the past few weeks!):

How did he become impaled on the barbed wire? Good question. Having known him for a while now, I believe he was trying to imitate Nik Wallenda by walking on it. The wound was on the back leg and stomach area – God only knows how he survived – so I think he was either doing a tight-rope act, or was trying to jump off the fence post. Either way, seriously, if you ever want to cut barbed wire, bring the sharpest pair of wire cutters, and the guy with the biggest hands, you can find. Seriously.

How is he doing now? Much better. He sits on my lap and falls asleep. When I get home, he gives me his little Hammie kisses – puts a paw on my nose, and then touches his nose to my face. He is slowly making himself at home. Everyone is coming to accept him more and more – the other night, Tiny even let him sleep close to him. Maximus kind of plays with him. Beth ignores him. Rascal is the disciplinarian – the other night, I heard Hammie yowling, and it turned out that he’d been attacking Rascal, who wasn’t having it, and Rascal was just holding him down on the ground with his paws.

Did I want a new kitten? NO, actually. A week before Hammie arrived, I found another kitten – I was’t supposed to be on that particular street, but I couldn’t make my usual turn. So I was there when a tiny ginger ball of fluff barreled across all four lanes of traffic, somehow made it to the other side, and kept going. I slammed on my brakes and went in search. He was fine – not a scratch on him – and I rushed him to my vet, who instantly fell in love. I could have brought that one home, but I knew how much it would upset everyone if I did. They had a status quo, and frankly, so did I. I was happy with that status quo. So Hammie has turned my world upside down, too.

But really – look at that face Look at those eyes. What choice did I have? 🙂

 

* My apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda and his genius lyrics. 

When Your Writing Needs a Kick-Start

Kick-start:  to start something, to give something energy. Literally, to kick a motorcycle into life. Figuratively, to jump-start something.

Like that writing project just sitting there?

If you’re anything like me, the last few months have been a downhill slide. Slow, sure, but steady. Yes, there have been moments where things have leveled out; you’ve felt okay, things seem to be going well – for me, that was two weeks ago when I rescued this adorable little thing that had somehow become impaled on a barbed wire fence –

but then something else happens and suddenly you’re on that downhill slide again, just trying to figure it all out and stay afloat.

Like, I suspect, a lot of writers, I had kind of thought that this time spent social distancing and staying home more would mean I could write more. I even printed out the last draft I’d done of my novel Ghost Hunt and went through it, making notes, reading over the notes I’d left myself. When I stopped that project last October so I could focus on the research for the Kimmel case, I left myself a pretty good blueprint to follow. The pages and pages of notes I’d written were excellent, and I was able to start to see where things needed to change, to be rewritten, in some cases where entire scenes needed to be deleted so that the blueprint could be followed.

And then, depression began to set in.

I don’t know about you, but when depression hits me – and it does often, and no, I’m not talking about ‘the blues’ or just feeling down in the dumps, but real, true depression, the kind it takes monumental effort to rouse yourself from, if you even can – I can’t write. At all. Some writers can write through it; some use writing as a way to raise themselves up from the depths, or to work through the causes of their depression. More power to them, and to you, if you’re like that. I wish I was! But when it hits me, I find myself unable to write a single thing. Can’t even look at my manuscript. The very idea of turning on the laptop and putting fingers to keyboard is just too exhausting, mentally and physically.

Especially not when those rewrites are so intense. 

I went through the manuscript in late May. But the more I thought about jumping in and starting those rewrites, the more overwhelming it all became. Because it’s a lot. And I’ve been doing rewrites to this thing for a long time. Add in the fact that I had planned to go to England in late May – in fact, I was about two days from booking the trip when everything shut down, I even had the itinerary putting me in London for at least one performance of Hamilton and the seat picked out, damn it! – just made it a thousand times worse. Because this novel is set in Oxford, and I just do not know how to write it when I’ve never been there. Hence, the need for that trip. I need the veracity, the sounds and smells of the city. I need to walk it, to know the streets and what you see when you turn this way on this corner. I know how the colleges are nestled next to each other in the heart of the city, but not how they mesh together. In short, how can I write about a city that’s beloved by thousands, when I’ve never been there? I can’t.

And so the rewrites became even more daunting, and I said screw it.

And that’s where it’s all sat for the last thirty days. I can’t go to my coffee shop and write in the afternoons, as I usually do almost every day in the summer. And it’s hard for me to write anywhere else. Home is congested, busy, full of things that need my attention. And sitting outside when it’s 102 in the shade is not happening. Besides. Those rewrites. Those daunting, exhausting rewrites. I couldn’t even think about them. And for the past month, I haven’t. Well, that’s not true. I’ve thought about them a little, in that fleeting, guilty way we think about projects that need to be done, those projects that skitter off into the abyss because we just can’t face them. Hunt was in danger of being one of those projects.

So a few days ago, I decided I had to do something.

The fact is, none of us knows what’s going to happen in the next two months, or two years. God help us all. And my depression isn’t going to magically go away on its own. There will be good days; there will be bad days. There will be days when I can barely function (except that I have no choice but to function, or the cats will eat me). I have to accept that, and jump in on the good days, and give myself a break on the bad ones.

So, I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo. 

We’re all familiar with NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. But it’s evolved beyond that, and now every July, you can join Camp NaNoWriMo. Here’s the website:  https://nanowrimo.org/

There are a few reasons why this is so great – and in fact, it might even be better than November:

• First of all, we’re stuck indoors anyway; we may as well put that time to good use.
• Second, some of us have drafts we started last November (or before) that need to be finished; this is a good time to revisit them.
• Third, you set your own goal. If 50,000 words is way too much, set the bar lower, like I did. I set my goal for 20,000 words – I don’t know how much rewriting I’ll be doing yet, but that seemed reasonable.
• Fourth:  it keeps you accountable on those long, hot summer days when we could so easily just lay on the couch and watch reruns of Bones and Supernatural and Dr. Phil, eating ice cream and dreading the coming of August.
• And fifth:  I needed the kickstart. 

As my friend is always telling me:  “You know how you get momentum? You go out there and you get it.” If I don’t write, the novel will never get done. If I don’t find a way to encourage myself, or even force myself, to write, I’ll never get the momentum going. For example, I tried all last year to lose weight. Fluctuated up and down, and by the time the year ended, I was right back where I’d started. I just couldn’t get the momentum going. But this year, I hit the ground running – literally – got a FitBit, and now I’m doing 3.5 miles per day, plus core workouts and some small hand weights, and I’ve lost 9lbs already this year. I went out and got the momentum. I kickstarted myself. And the FitBit keeps me accountable. I know what calorie count I need to hit every day to continue to lose weight. Just like I know what I need to do to finish this novel.

So I signed up. Did the whole thing – typed up a short synopsis of the novel, uploaded a short excerpt, and put in my word count. Maybe by doing just a bit at at time, I can get the momentum going. I have the blueprint. I know what needs to be done.

And hopefully, this is the kick-start I need to get it done.