Notes To Stephanie: Middle Aged Love Letters And Life Stories

After writing the two Notes To Stephanie (NTS below) books I turned my thoughts to what I would write about next. After some thought I decided to write two books about my family using the same general format as the first two books.

One book, this one, will be stories about my two children who are of course mentioned in the two NTS books. The other would be about things that happened before my kids were born. In short they would be, as Days Remembered is, memoirs of sorts whose events are told in short notes. The four books taken together will be a series called therefore “The Notes Series”.

I think this format works wells for me as a writer but also works well for the reader. The notes are short and also to the point. Since each note is mostly independent of another note one can read one or several in one sitting. Thus the format seems to be convenient.

As in Days Remembered I have not assigned dates to the notes since so many of the stories told herein happened as long as 25 years ago. Regardless of the date of the event in each note they are things that were important, funny, or milestones in the lives of my two kids.

Like I did in the first two books, I have not used my kid’s real names. As before they called are “Jane” and “Roger”. Of course these names, and those of others too, are not real but the stories are certainly true, although some of the details have faded with the time that has passed.

Hopefully these little tales of kids now big and grown up will remind you of things your children did when they were growing up and were making that long journey from kid to young adult. That way one can perhaps see the picture of their lives from the perspective of someone like you who has been there before and who enjoyed the happy times, worried when things were tough, and in the end witnessed the magic of unique children growing up and finding their own path in life as we all once did.

Jeff Turner, 1/1/2010.

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Afterward

This third book in my “Notes” series is now done. I hope the stories I wrote about gave you something to remember about your own children. Hopefully good things more than things that were not so good.

The mixture of good times and bad times with kids is of course par for the course when dealing with raising them. It is a time in one’s life that is filled with so many things that will both make you happy and also perhaps sadden and haunt you in your older years.

Regardless it is a story most of us have been a character in. Thus, it is a natural thing to have children and to tell them, or their offspring, these stories. And that may be the true value in what I have written. Retelling events of a family and its generations is a worthwhile thing. It is part of what makes us who we are and also tells us about what we are made of as human beings.