memory

Chris Knight's avatar

Yesterday I shared an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst, from the end of chapter 37.  That excerpt dealt with my life on September 10th, 2001.  And the last thing that I did before falling asleep late that night was to thank God for all of the good that He had brought into my life.  If the previous several months could have been that good, I had no doubt that the rest of my life could be just as amazing.  I was 27 years old, with everything ahead of him.  I was in love, I had a good job, I was writing for publication on a daily basis.  And on the night of September 10th I had started writing the script for my very first movie.

My eyes closed, and I was looking forward to another day of being grateful.

Here is another excerpt.  The final part of ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The following is an excerpt from my memoir Keeping the Tryst.  It appears just before the end of chapter 37.

~


September 10, 2001…

That night I was scheduled to work. And there were three things that I was eager to do when I got home…

The first was to call Lisa.

Secondly, I wanted to start work on writing the script for the movie.  Even though I had no grasp whatsoever of crafting a screenplay.

Finally, it was a big night for TheForce.net staff.  We would be up all evening getting a bunch of stories about the Episode I DVD release ready to publish at midnight Pacific Time.

Lisa and I talked for a bit, then I threw a pizza into the oven and while that was cooking I started writing the first lines of what I was calling “Sithery”.  It seemed as good a working title ...

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This weekend in Atlanta is the annual Dragon Con.  I’m remembering the first time I went to that.

It was another Labor Day weekend, twenty-five years ago.  The night before it started, my Star Wars website TheForce.net published an interview that I did with “Weird Al” Yankovic.  I left my apartment in Asheville the next day and drove three hours to my girlfriend’s place at University of Georgia.  We got to Atlanta and walked around Dragon Con a bit, then we hooked up with another TheForce.net staffer named Alena.  We wound up having dinner along with a few Dragon Con guests (the actress who played Vasquez in the movie Aliens was a few spots down the table from us).  Alena was a really sweet young lady, she was host of the site’s new weekly video feature.  We then went to a little gathering where among other people were Peter Mayhew ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

My memoir Keeping the Tryst has been getting around some.  I confess, its biggest audience seems to be composed of people who have known me, friends and family.  It’s gotten some other purchases, though it’s far from being a “bestseller”.  Still, I’ve been happy.  And one never knows how far a book will get in the larger scheme of things.  A lot of books started out selling small but went on to bigger things.

One of the most consistent remarks that I’ve gotten about Keeping the Tryst has been about my memory.  This book covers half a century of the lifetime of an American boy, and it does so in at times almost microscopic detail.  As I said in the first chapter, I have no idea how it is that I remember some things so vividly and clearly.  It just “is”.  Sometimes I feel like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist
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Tonight it’s another case of perfect recall come unbidden.  I’ve been told that how this translated into the writing for my book is pretty astonishing.  Sometimes I feel this is what it was like for Billy Pilgrim, the unstuck-in-time protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five.  One moment I’m here in the present, then Bam! I’m in the past, reliving the moment.  And sometimes it’s like flashes of the future come too.

So here’s the latest trip back in time…

I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing on this night in 1992.  I was in Virginia Beach, there to see a friend I had been known in middle school and high school until she and her family relocated (her father was a Methodist minister and he was given a new church to pastor).  My sister and I had come to see Dana graduate from high school.  Anyway, that afternoon ...

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As of five minutes ago I have finished drinking my first cup of coffee since 8:20 p.m. on March 5th, 1993.

If we were to take a time machine back to that moment in the kitchen of the house I grew up in, that’s what you would find me doing.

I am sooo not kidding, folks.  As I say in the first chapter of my book, I have no idea why I remember some things with such pristine clarity.  It’s as if I’m reliving them in the here and now.

The coffee I had then was a French vanilla brew.  This time it was a mocha-something.  Be kind, this is the very first coffee I’ve bought on my own so I’m not sure about a lot of things involving the stuff.  But last weekend a good friend told me I need to get some coffee and real tea into my ...

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