This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMaio. I am going to do a couple of things I don't usually do here.

I'm going to tell you a story about myself from my own history.

I keep finding myself telling it. I had a book of Memory Palace stories come out last November and at book events at readings and interviews and stuff.

This specific memory or set of memories or memory set among context of other memories, however it really is that memory really works,

keeps coming to mind. This one story just keeps coming out. It has been my go-to answer to a question

I keep getting asked. And I have become so quick

to go to that answer that I have at times found myself mid-answer in mid-telling of this story,

regretting having started telling it, suddenly wondering whether I'm just giving some pat

answer as though there was something less than sincere happening, that this is some sort of canned response,

like some script handed to someone with a headset at a call center

to help them answer common questions about health insurance claims

or clearing printer jams.

And this is a thing for me as just like a person in the world.

I have a hang up. I tend to distrust words that come

too easily. Have the sense that real thought requires new language. And so there, mid-response to

an old question, I get this nagging feeling that maybe I'm not digging deeply enough, not meeting

this question with the same sincerity with

which it had been posed. But no, the answer keeps coming to me because it is the correct one.

So someone asked me why I tell these stories this way. I am a writer. I have a specific set of

fascinations like writers do. I could, the question goes, be writing

about my particular, very particular fascination with the past, telling stories about the past

in presumably any format, in novels, or magazine articles, or screenplays, or blog posts, or

...