Look at how Hampl begins her memoir. By setting us in place and time: the what: music (her father, piano, etc); the who: her seven year old self; and, the where: in the basement of St Luke's. We don't know where St. Luke's is but if we do a search we find out that Hampl grew up in St. Paul, MN.
Then there are two characters that emerge, first her father but then she is "given over to" Sister Olive and Sister Olive becomes the way that Hampl gets us into the memoir and her own objectives--the ways she had at that time for making sense (2ndpar, 6thline).
She then shifts momentarily back to her father and the family recitals. She sets up the motivations for going to the basement room with the pianos where she finds Sister Olive. She was to learn how to play the piano so that she might play her part in family recitals. Those are the facts.
Is there a question embedded in this beginning? What does Hampl want to know about her seven year old self and her interactions with her family and Sister Olive? She says that the Olive “made sense” and she seems glad of it. What other things did or did not make sense for her? The melting into one another when the family played together is definitely one of those things that surely stood out in her childhood and couldn't have made sense. Right? How did it happen that playing music together did that to her family and why does she remember it so clearly? These questions are certainly ones that she could have had as she started this memoir. Questions that she wished to explore.
This question of the purposes of family music gets more specific when in the next paragraph (par. 4) she finds "middle C" and determines that it is "the belly button of the piano"-- a first realization of metaphor. But think about it. She couldn't at age seven have put the name "metaphor" on the idea of middle C--her play with words. Kids play with words naturally and maybe she realized this back then but couldn't have known why it was interesting. It's the adult Hampl who tells us that her kid self was working in metaphor. See what she does: she takes a childhood wonder and describes it for us in adult language but keeps us securely in the world of her seven-year old self.
And this metaphor talk has two purposes as we will see, 1) is to recognize a moment where she marvels about something she recalls from that time and, 2) she gives that moment a meaning that comes from her experience as an adult writer and writer of memoirs. This last purpose is of course the purpose of the essay: to demonstrate a memoir. For in a memoir, you pay attention to images (metaphors) and you try to exploit them for meaning. You try to figure out your younger self and why these things, these marvelous moments, occurred to her. And in fact, at the end of this paragraph she addresses the reader, a reader who wants to know even if he doesn't know he wants to know what it is she is doing by writing a memoir.
After this bit of voice over, Hampl returns to the music room and to her metaphors--her attempts to reveal herself--and to Sister Olive. This time to Sister Olive's sneezing at the window. Now you might ask how did she recall that Sister Olive sneezed the way she did at that moment on that first day, etc. The skeptical among you might say that it is impossible. Others will not have even stopped to consider whether she was telling the whole truth here and accepted it as fact.
You might think that you could not ever recall a scene so rich and you would be right because Hampl probably didn't recall it either at least not in its entirety. What I'm saying is that she might have seen Sister Olive on another occasion sneezing her little sneezes after showing her middle C but those two incidents probably never occurred at the same time but they occurred nonetheless, so as a writer she has license to warp time and put the two things together. It's not lying exactly because the two things did happen but not at the same time, but for effect (thinks Hampl) I will put them together. And the effect she wants is to paint a enticing picture of that first day in the basement of St. Lukes in order to tell us more about how things make sense so that we might read on to find the answer.
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