Today’s prompt for Just Jot It January is ‘indelible’.

I have forgotten so much… I took a BA in Literature, yet I cannot recall 3/4 of the books I’ve read. I’ve heard hundreds of jokes, but can – upon compulsion – remember only a few. On facebook, I have dozens of ‘friends’ from high school about whom I know practically nothing. Yes, memory is fickle. Yet some experiences are… wait for it… indelible.

This morning, I was reminded of a precious experience when I came across this photo on a cool blog by Simon Ponder, who was kind enough to reply to a post I made yesterday begging visitors to leave a link to their blogs.

bamboo

Excellent photo right? Well, it put me in mind of a time when friends and I were exploring the grounds of an old shut-down resort on Jeju Island in South Korea.

The resort was done up to look like a castle, and its many acres of grounds were heavily overgrown. We dove into the pathless forest there and were pretty far in when we came to an enormous stand of tall bamboo trees, much like the trees in Simon’s photo.

Needless to say, there aren’t any great groves of old-growth bamboo in Indiana, so this was a wondrous and exotic sight for me. I moved in awe among the trees, as did the Canadian friends I was with.

I might close this post at this point, because I am a big fan of short-and-sweet, but for the fact that I have undertaken a new writing challenge presented by author Jeff Goins.

500words_wide-e1388529158371

The challenge is to write at least one 500-word piece daily, and since I am already halfway there with this post, I will press on to meet my quota. One of the first writing prompts Goins offers in his challenge is to write about the ‘best day of your life’… Since this fits well with JusJoJan’s ‘indelible’, I’ll give it a go.

I’m not usually one for choosing favorite things. It’s always hard for me. Funny thing about that is, ‘Favorites’ is an exercise I used again and again as a teacher of conversational English. First, I would write this on the board:

What is your favorite ____________?

And together with the class, I would generate a list of words that could go in the blank, such as ‘song’ or ‘type of music’, ‘book’ or ‘genre of literature’, ‘movie’ or ‘kind of film’, etc.

Then I would have them break off into pairs and practice asking and answering questions about their favorite things, writing down their partners’ answers.

Finally, we would reconvene as a class, and I would call upon individual students to report what each had learned about his or her partner.

I have answers to a few questions about my favorite things.

Song: Summer in Siam by The Pogues

 

But do I have a favorite day of my life? Gosh. I think not. Certainly, some of my best days were days when I taught, so I guess I will let my little lesson plan above suffice to describe a favorite day. An indelible memory.

Thanks for reading. Do you play favorites? What is your favorite ________?