My name is Leslie. I enjoy writing. And I have too much to forget.

I started this short-story, mostly travel memoir collection in honor of my late father, Paul Elvig.

My dad also loved to write, and he wrote down many of his stories in a similar short-story format. He envisioned one day of publishing his writings in a book called “Who’s On My Potato Salad?” These would be stories largely from his time spent dedicated to cemeteries.

But my dad got Alzheimer’s. We watched over the course of nearly four years until his death in 2021 as these stories sleepily drifted off to the world of memory loss. Stories that were once told and retold were never heard again.

I’ve spent my fair share of time wondering– worrying– if the same will happen to me. All of my precious memories– the funny, the poignant, the life-shaping, the unbelievable– swept away in the cobwebs of the mind, forgotten for so long that they no longer can be called memories.

But even without Alzheimer’s to rob me of these stories I love so much, I find that time has its own way pruning off those moments that we rarely revisit. I start to question myself on things like, “What was her clever reply to me? I thought I’d never forget” or, “Did that story happen in Thailand or Vietnam?” I’d find that I replayed stories in my mind only through visions and not with recounting, and realized that after 10 years of story-telling in my mind, I can’t remember the name of that person anymore.

I’ve been blessed to experience a lot in this life, with travel to six continents, working in many different contexts, meeting all kinds of people, and learning new things. And I’m hoping I’ll be blessed with decades more of this. Experiences turn into stories, and stories get refolded into reflections, which create a beautiful combination of the old and the new. A story with the passage of time becomes a memoir.

Many people, when overwhelmed with information, will say that it is “too much to remember.” This collection of my stories is for the opposite phenomenon. I have too much that is too important to me to let it be forgotten.

I hope you enjoy reading my stories and musing over the events and thoughts as much as I enjoy it. But mostly, I hope for this to be a library of my favorite things that have happened, one where these stories will never slip away and be forgotten.

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Names and locations may be changed or edited in my stories as seen fit to protect identifying people and places that should not be identified online.