In The Writing Life on
21 June 2009 with 1 comment
I wish I knew why I seem to write most prolifically when I’m supposed to be paying attention. It’s one of those leftover behaviors from elementary school – moving from one state where I attended the next grade for reading and my class was learning cursive and rudimentary French … to one where my new classmates were halfway through their first phonics workbook. I spent a lot of the years between the move and college writing on hidden sheets of paper.
Yesterday I woke at dawn to attend a district Toastmasters meeting, even though I stayed up until midnight the night before. This required driving 90 miles to Cookeville, and I showed up 90 minutes early. So I found someone I knew, asked to borrow a pen, and filled about five pages in a long-neglected paper journal.
Even though I’m the furthest from a morning person, I loved that feeling. Of being up in the cool gray at the end of the night, of making permanent marks on impermanent pages. I wonder if I can make this a habit.
In Quarterlife on
14 June 2009 with no comments
My toiletries are still in plastic zipper bags on the counter of my sink. Life’s been that way the last week: a steady drumbeat of triage, if such a thing can exist, and keeping the messes under wraps – or at least, fervently believing one is – while carrying on.
Can I even articulate what I am feeling right now? I’m not sure. Most of what I’m feeling is indifferent. There’s intellectual disappointment, a feeling of “that’s a shame,” akin to someone saying, “that’s funny,” but not laughing. But there’s also a lack of the crucial element of surprise that usually sucks the air and life out of the room when I feel particularly disappointed.
Is it really disappointment when it doesn’t surprise you, when you knew this was the inevitable? That’s the fog that lifted some time in the last week, no less tangible and palpable than the one that settled over the thick foliage of the park we ran the 5K in, early Saturday morning, while African drummers pelted out a steady rhythm while wearing ridiculous Hammer pants with obscenely sagging lime-green crotches.
I wonder if it’s a surprise. It is to me – that I can now think with the same clarity about my own life that I can about others’. That, if I had to choose, what I would choose. That we are barreling past multiple event horizons and into one inescapable singularity. That nothing has changed and yet so much has.
That this is the best I can do to describe what is when I have words for what doesn’t.
That I am waiting.
That I am ready to dig in and get started.
In Family on
6 June 2009 with no comments
It’s been a ridiculously long week. I’m not sure there’s any way to articulate the maelstrom of thoughts, ideas, and feelings that have flowed in and around us … and not sure it’s appropriate to anyway.
I absolutely adored Bonnie. The way her whole face lit up when she saw Stephen, her fantastic sense of humor, her skill at retelling mundane events into memorable stories – including one about a stray she fed and called I Don’t Want You Cat. She always made me feel welcome when I tagged along with Stephen on a visit, even though the distraction of our young love probably slowed the frequency of his trips to see her. I am grateful to have known her and I am glad my husband was blessed with such a loving grandmother. I am deeply saddened that the world is a bit dimmer without her light to shine in it.
