Today, I thought, let’s start with the title of the poem. That original title was “catch and release” which came, I think, from looking back at my recent titles and getting caught on the poem “release” from two days ago.

The title I chose provides emphasis on the first line of the poem and also plays with the name of the popular messaging app “WhatsApp”, which once I realized I could not resist, being so overly fond of cleverness.

More important for me though is that it doesn’t announce the theme of catching and releasing too soon. That theme is given outright at the end of the poem, but offering a list without telling a reader what the connections are allows the reader to wander within the list and deduce their own connections.

It also makes a second or third read of the poem likely to evoke different associations with the list and hopefully also rewards the reader with insight.

I debated calling the poem “twenty-two” for just a second, but that title would be possibly obscure and definitely too clever, even in my book.

I’m a bit torn with the end of the poem and on a different day I would change it, I think. Mainly my issue is how obvious the ending is, that the ultimate catch and release is our lives. On the other hand, the last line wrote itself–I felt it coming as soon as I wrote “for one more moment to be young”.

This poem wasn’t immediately a poem about dementia, but now that I have sat with it I realize it is, though it was not my intention to write about memory loss today. Probably because my mom’s condition and the condition of so many other people in my life is thus, the idea of trying to catch our memories one last time is simply on my mind.

The picture today is from the honor panels at Camp Billings, the summer camp where I spent so much of my life. Google found this for me, a fishing expedition for the word “catch” in my photos. I love the connection with the poem–the lake, memories, fishing–and also the condition of the panel–I did almost no editing on this photo.

These panels are kept on the ceiling of the large hall where campers and staff gather for shows and storms and rainy days. I love that you can clearly see that someone added tape to hold the paper together many years ago, clearly an attempt to hold onto these memories as long as possible.