Memoir and a Frisbee - My Very Own Madeleine

In which I explain the Frisbee as the meaning of life

Nov 11, 2022

(image by Ron Lach / Pexels)

Yesterday, as I was reading

George was discussing the end of his book tour. He was writing about his writing process, as he does, explaining how to participate in the creation of the story, asking what the story wants from you, the author, looking at the process as if outside of it.

He says, “It’s something like that moment when an errant Frisbee comes your way and it occurs to you that you could catch it. (Why not? That’s fun.).
That state…I could stand to be in forever.”

It was the end of his post. There’s more to the context, of course, but I realized in reading that passage that the Frisbee is my very own madeleine, a la Proust.

You see, when my brother committed suicide, he left presents for all us, his loved ones. He lined up all of his best Frisbees and gave one to each of us, as if they were going away presents or consolation prizes. For a while, I hated that yellow Frisbee. I’d rather have my brother back. But I dutifully kept it in the back of my closet as tribute to him.

It was a rare moment that he didn’t have a Frisbee handy or want to play catch. My earliest memories of him are playing Frisbee.

He could flick his wrist with grace — standing or from a low catch near the ground, or one the run behind his back — and send the disc soaring to its target. He rarely missed. We were both left-handed (though I’m properly ambidextrous and can throw a Frisbee with either hand), and he’d try to show me how to throw. Mostly I’d coil it up near my chest and fling my arm out, sending it off oto one side, a hook, a slice, always holding on a bit too long or letting it go too early. Later, I got the hang of it, sort of.

It was difficult competing with my brother because he was so good at so many things, and to watch him, he made something like throwing a Frisbee seem so effortless.

I first became interested in memoir, long before I wrote my own, from reading Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I had spent many years studying what I called experimental novels, usually long tomes that defied narrative conventions, such as strict linearity of plot or character development. These books rambled, played with chapter structure, seemingly didn’t give a whit about the needs of the reader, and yet, as a reader, I found them absorbing.

When I got to the end of AHWOSG, the narrator (Dave) and his brother Toph are playing Frisbee at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. He describes in detail their playing Frisbee catch, a show, a true performance in which people gather to watch (much like people gather to watch George Saunders’s mind in Story Club, seeing how it works, trying to ferret out the secrets to writing success.

Eggers says it’s usually windy at Ocean Beach,

“and the wind just destroys any kind of throw you want to do unless you’re just standing next to each other and dinking it back and forth like a couple of pussies. To throw and have it be any fun we need some calm, because we need to wing that fucker. And of course people stop and watch us, we’re so fucking good. People young and old, whole families, gather to ooh and ahh, thousands of people, they’e brought picnics, binoculars—

“Not like we’re frisbee geeks—we don’t wear fucking headbands or anything— We’re just good, so good— We throw it high and far. We just get as far apart as we think we can get— And so we sent flowers and Lance, who was always closest to her ….”

And Eggers seamlessly transitions to another topic, the madeleine leading him where it will in his mind to the topic he’s really trying to talk about.

Frisbees are like that for me. You send them into the sky and the wind catches them and takes it where they will. But if you have some skill, like my brother had, you can master flight.

For a time, I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, in the shadow of Yale University. I even spent time working in the famed Sterling Memorial Library (it’s haunted) on a special project, rearranging 14 floors of books (2.5 million books with a team of 12 of us and small rolling carts). It was a good job, surrounded by books, flexing our muscles. And with our small team, we were at it for a while, until the pandemic halted our efforts as we were one floor from finishing the job.

I learned that Yale believes the Frisbee was invented there. A group of Yale students (Yalies) tossed around an empty pie tin of the nearby Bridgeport Frisbie Pie Company. The legend claims that the students would yell “Frisbie!” when an errant throw approached passersby, much as a golfer yells “fore!” Yale would take credit for the earth revolving around the sun, if they could, and there is a dispute as to the origins of the Frisbee. But it’s possible/plausible that the Frisbee was created at Yale.

Once again, when I learned of the Frisbee-Yale connection, my mind meandered to my brother, and the row of Frisbees, and his final flight.

I kept my yellow Frisbee for many years, even after I sold almost everything I owned to move onto a sailboat. Quarters were tight and the books had to go - to be replaced by digital versions on a Kindle. But I held onto that Frisbee. I got a storage shed at the marina for the overflow of stuff, and there it sat. Whenever I’d retrieved clothes or items from the shed, the Frisbee would slide off the top of the stack and out of the shed, as if it were saying “play with me!”

Sometimes I think Frisbees have a life of their own. They get lost. Often, they end up on roofs, abandoned there, unable to be retrieved, where they sit and contemplate the stars. Many were the times that my brother had to retrieve a Frisbee from the roof when we were kids. My brother could jump onto our roof in two strides, with the help of a fence and a tree branch on the side of our house. He was agile, spiderman without a web. My dad would yell at us to stay off the roof, but Lynn would easily climb up to retrieve balls and Frisbees. I only made it onto the roof once or twice because of a childhood fear of heights.

By the time I was leaving the marina, I had mastered heights, could easily wench myself up to the top of a mast in a bosun’s chair to inspect lines.

Near the end of my time at the marina, following a painful divorce and having to sell Pegasus, my 1979 Hans Christian 38, Mark II, a beautiful boat that did its share of flying through the waters off the west coast, I finally had the opportunity to toss that Frisbee a few times. A buddy of mine, who was helping me move, and I tossed it on the small putting green near the marina building and the storage sheds. Sure enough, after only a few throws, I hooked one and the Frisbee landed on the roof of the sheds.

It would take borrowing a ladder and climbing up to retrieve that Frisbee.

I was tired and defeated from the move. Losing that Frisbee seemed like another defeat. The marina grounds had a ladder, somewhere. But I thought about it and decided I’d leave the Frisbee there. I didn’t have any room where I was moving, and the yellow Frisbee had merely gathered dust in the back of my closet. I wouldn’t forget my brother, and the Frisbee, while a physical reminder of him, wasn’t and would never be him.

What better tribute to my brother? What better place to leave his Frisbee than on a rooftop fading the sun?

So what do you think? Do you have a Frisbee? Do you have something in your life that serves as your “madeleine” that takes you back to an earlier time in your memory?

My Own Private Waste Land

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