A Site to Remember

     I have no comment about what's going on in Washington right now, because, really -- what can you say? It's a manufactured crisis, and however it's solved it does nothing to address our very real problems involving the debt, health care, energy, unemployment, the environment, education -- not to mention issues overseas from Afghanistan to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Hopefully, we (meaning Congress and the President) can begin to approach all these issues with more maturity, responsibility and effectiveness than this stupid debt-ceiling limit.

     So on another, perhaps more useful and delightful note, I thought I'd pass on a link to this new social-networking site called proust.com. It's a place "for you and your loved ones to share and pass on stories" to capture the "life stories and thoughts of the people you love -- to discover who they really are."

     The idea is for you and your family to visit the site, which offers questions for you to answer, or to ask your loved ones, that will encourage people to recall what's important in their lives. It has various prompts, such as, Dad, if you could go back to one age, what would it be and why? Or, Grandma, describe something mischievous you did as a child. Or,what advice would you give to your ten-year-old self? Or, you can ask questions of your own, different questions for different members of the family, or the same question for everyone to answer. Proust.com saves the answers and stories and photos on your own page, and eventually you can collect them into a personal memoir, or family history, or record of a group of people at a special time in life.

     The site, which does require registration, also offers various chapters to get you started, such as "Remember the Time," and "High School Years" and "First Loves." There's also a chapter called "The Proust Questionnaire" with 33 Proustian questions about attitudes and likes and dislikes. Your answers can be kept private or shared with the public.

     Of course the site is designed with older people in mind, so they (we) can share memories, advice and stories with family and friends. According to The Week magazine, co-founder Tom Cortese said the idea came to him after watching his grandmother battle dementia. "It was just this process of seeing memories go by the wayside," he said. "There were so many stories I wish I knew about her life."

     The site is named after French novelist Marcel Proust, author of the multivolume, 3000-plus-page novel about time and memory In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past.

     So go check out the site. And hopefully, no one will be moved to write about where they were in the summer of 2011 when the economy collapsed because of a stalemate over the debt ceiling and the Dow Jones Average dropped a thousand points and nobody got their Social Security checks for three months running.