Sunriiiiiise, Sunset... Sunriiiiiiise, Sunset....

I still haven't felt like writing, so am putting up this old chestnut written when my daughter's marriage was looming...

Looking back over the quicksilver years, it’s easy enough now to identify those many defining moments when my world as parent cracked open. “It’s a girl!”; “Hello? This is the principal calling - there’s been an accident”; “Mom, Nick asked me out on a date!”; “Guess what! I’ve got my own apartment!” “I hate you!”, “I love you” -- countless events, conversations, prayers and pleas - those emotional threads invisibly weaving the silken bond between parent and child. So fragile, so amazingly resilient, so immovably strong is this gossamer fabric woven in the unspoken, gentle dance of family life. We pull it tight around us, craving its comfort in the warm familiarity of a lifetime spent together when cold realities threaten at fate’s whim..

Today, a new moment to add, a new thread of color begins - “Mom, I’m getting married” One hears the songs, Sunrise Sunset, one watches the Kodak commercials, one acknowledges the facts of childhood’s swift passage without really absorbing it all, busy as we are with the day to day journey of family survival. As a single parent, the years of child rearing were always ones of hardship, heartache, a great roller coaster of up and down emotional wallops - time only seemed to stand still due to the sheer exhaustive nature of the task at hand. My independent streak silently screamed, "When will I get some time to read again? When can I sleep through the night again? When will I have any extra money for myself again? When will the worry stop?" My life loomed ahead as an endless string of unselfish responsibilities forced upon me and I looked forward to the time when I would have my life back. I loved my children fiercely, but their childhoods seemed, at the time, to be ignoring the “time passes so quickly” mantra of parenting. I felt heavy with the burden of them, with only my maternal love and their bright little spirits to buoy me during the process of getting through each day with my good humor intact. Yet, despite it all, I recall crying over the sentiments of the lyrics, “turn around and he’s 3, turn around and he’s 4, turn around and he’s a young man going out of the door”, yet not fully grasping the implications of truth found in the prophetic words. I grasp them now.

Time, that sly rascal, plays a tricky game with us. At the outset, with one’s entire parental experience ahead, time stretched out eternal in its hopes and possibilities. One sensed an endless road ahead, filled with all the time needed to right wrongs, reverse unfortunate judgment calls, and instill all of life’s goodness into the malleable clay of a child's spirit. Armed with immeasurable parental love, it seemed a cinch to carry forth and prosper at being the SuperSingleParent. Wrong. Somehow, and I can’t figure out how, time managed to maintain a false image of an endless tomorrow where we still had time to fix things, we still had time to savor the child’s presence. After all, look, he’s just ten, she’s just eight. Still plenty of time left. In fact, time seemed to slow, and they would stay small forever - I always had tomorrow. Then, of course, with the coming agony of teenagers, the sheer maddening chaos of it all, one wished for time to pass in an instant. The only thought of mother and child was to hang on by our collective fingernails until we reached the proverbial other shore of twenty years, a glorious number with nary a teen in it... But here’s where Time has his little laugh. While all are heaving massive sighs of relief, and giving ourselves hearty pats on the back for surviving this ancient battleground, we are slow to notice that in the last six years of crisis and turmoil, time noticeably sped up, somersaulting over itself in a rush to the finish line. In a blink, the end is in sight, the time for teaching, correcting past mistakes, for love’s touch has passed. It’s just not amusing at all.

So, I watch my second and last-born...twenty-four, blessedly human again, now marrying - with gusto. I find myself staring at her all the time, like when she was newborn. I drink her in, moonily mesmerized by the perfection of offspring, failing to quench a sudden and intense thirst for her face, her laughter, her company. “Mooom,” she wails, glancing at me sideways, catching my stare. “Quit staring at me! Why are you looking at me all the time?” We laugh, and silently acknowledge the need for this mother-child bond to Never Ever Stop.

As she begins her new life safely cocooned in the warmth and security of a man who loves her, I offer her up tentatively to the future that awaits her, hoping that the fates will be as kind to her as they've been to me in so many ways. I hope she knows that, as is the eventual way of all children, while Time may have moved her physically from my presence and Love has created a new, fledging family to which her attentions will be rightfully focused, that she and I are forever linked and blessed in a bond of shared histories, emotional and physical traits, and a love that goes bone deep.

I welcome Jeremy into this waltz of mother and daughter already in progress – he picked up on the steps pretty early for a guy, and I appreciate that he respects things enough to not want to change the music; just the order on the dance card, which is just right.

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Quote of the day: The martini tasted like John Coltrane sounds. Robert Parker. "Backstory"
Chosen because I love the brilliance of using one sense to describe another - Coltrane sets the tone..you just KNOW what the room looks like, the stage that's being set, the mood the martini is setting. So simple...wish I could think of things like this. I have shamelessly stolen this idea in a few things. Don't tell.

4-4 Writing Exercise - "Engagement Party"

Write two separate versions of the same event: An engagement party. First, with an "I" narrating from the point of view of the mother of the groom. Then use the third person, "she."

"I am by far the oldest woman at this table. When I first held Harry in my arms, little did I dream it would take him forty-eight years to find and marry the girl of his dreams. I don't exaggerate when I say "girl" either. Look at her, she's a baby - twenty-eight and her mother could be my own daughter for crying out loud. I'd drink myself into a stupor if I didn't have to worry about appearances. Oh..stop. Tonight is Harry and Bree's night (what kind of name is Bree anyway? Sounds like a underarm deodorant) and I'll ignore the fact that I'm the only one here who recalls Pearl Harbor as an actual memory, not a history lesson. God, I miss William. We would have had a field day with this bunch. God. It's time for me to toast my baby boy and his baby bride. I have no idea what to say. "

Martha couldn't believe her son Harry was marrying someone that could be her own granddaughter. She felt so terribly awkward, feeling as if the others might be staring at her, wondering what she thought of it all. In between sips of her Dom Perignon, she snuck peeks at some of her new in-laws. If only her husband, William, was still alive; he would have buffered the pangs of age in a room scented with the blooms of youth. The two of them, with the shared silent signals learned from a lifetime together, would have been winking and nodding wildly at each other over the plates of pate. With a sigh she stood, raising her glass while her son whispered in his new wife's ear.

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Quote of the day - We tiptoed through there like a fat boy through a wolf pack. Leif Enger "Peace Like a River"
Chosen because, come on...how fabulous is this simile? I really enjoyed this book and his colorful writing. I ended up with more than one quote out of it.

4-3 My first short story ever

I hadn't learned at this point to show and not tell. So this is a bit "telly" and not "showy." But I was so thrilled to have come up with something. Fiction is not my forte. Clive Mighty was a name of a person who left my place of employment before I got there. I heard someone say his name and loved it, stealing it shamelessly for a future story. I thought it was a fabulous character name and just crying for a story to live in.

Words of a Lifetime

Clive Mighty didn’t possess what you would call a complex nature. The fifteen square miles or so of Waterloo, Alabama contained all he ever would know about life and he grew into an old man never having slipped outside the county line. He was just fine with that. “I do all my traveling in my books” he often said. “A man can meet some fine folks in books, can go to some mighty far places.”

While not a scholar by any stretch, he loved to read more than anything else in the world. His momma, Irene, had started looking after the small Waterloo library after Miss Iris Holloway, who had been a quiet but effective librarian for 53 years, suffered a stroke right there at the check-out desk stamping little Peter Pinkney’s Jungle Book renewal. Young Peter recovered from the event; Miss Iris did not. With no qualified candidate on the horizon to replace her, which is to say, anyone with breath and limbs willing to tackle the job, a rotation of overwhelmed volunteers managed just well enough to keep the doors open, but it looked as if the library would close. Irene met her beloved husband at the library when she was seventeen and figured to repay her cosmic debt by rescuing the old place. Through her attentive, organized efforts, the library again thrived and little five-year old Clive discovered the sweet agony of anticipation inherent in a reader’s life. He was not without the maximum eight books a week for the next ten years of his life, which is when the library lost its appeal for Irene and he had the limited stacks just about read and memorized. Fortunately, by then fifteen, his book habit was buried bone deep and he invented ways to get rides to Bridgewater, the county seat, whose library enticed him with a much larger, more sophisticated collection and the librarian always assumed he was a college student which he liked.

Clive felt more at home in books than he did in his own life. Real people requiring real conversations made him a bit nervous; but book characters seeped into him slow and comforting, and he drank them in like dry ground after a soaking rain. Over the years, he stuffed his growing collection into every unused nook of his small but cozy house like a squirrel tucking away provisions for a long winter’s siege. Clive savored words, silently rolling them around on his tongue so as to suck all the flavor out of them - he didn’t read as much as absorb the page. He loved looking up new words that promised uncharted territory. He thrilled at how different authors could mix and match common everyday words all together in distinct and separate ways, how each could be telling a similar tale but with such different melodies in their sentences; an enchantment he often compared to the centuries of transcendent music that have sprung from the same twelve notes, a fact which never ceased to amaze and enthrall him. So it was the natural progression of things that Clive should take over as the Waterloo librarian after his graduation from Bridgewater City College. As he sat for the first time behind the massive oak desk that served as check-in/check-out and general information, he reached his hand underneath, groping for what he knew he would find among the ancient, hardened chewing gum mounds. Clive Mighty is here. The deep grooves and scratches tickled his fingers as he remembered that rainy Saturday afternoon when he had crawled under the desk on a private, personal dare. Irene had disappeared for a stack straightening, a perfect opportunity for him to claim the space as his own with a small knife recently given him for his eleventh birthday. Now, a matching eleven years later, Clive chuckled at the prophetic carved message. “I’m back” he whispered to the ghost-boy, whose muffled giggles, born of the innocent elation of new adventure, still echoed off the polished wood. Clive Mighty is here, alright. So began his career with books and he remained at the library, at that desk content, efficient, and well-liked for the next fifty years.

Other than the library, there wasn’t much else in life that caught Clive’s eye. He had liked girls well enough, but they never had taken to him and his shy ways. Most girls had been easily baited by the hook of his thick brown hair, twinkling eyes, and medium, stocky build, but his body language, along with a mind that inexplicably turned simple in female company, betrayed the helpless discomfort he felt circling in their bewildering orbits. They tittered and shimmered down the street in a pageant of hats and slender calves peeking out from the latest A-lines. His mouth simply dried up at the sight of them, watching as he usually did from the safe distance and easy separation provided by the large library windows. After a few disastrous attempts at dating a few of the quieter ones, he gave up all hope of finding married bliss and learned to live with a lower set of expectations. Truth be known, it came about a bit easier than he thought, helped along by the fact that cats were better company than he ever knew and he soon owned three fat, furry felines of varying and dubious genealogies which had the full run of his house and heart.

He had been orphaned at twenty-three, when his parents died within six months of each other; his father of a heart attack while watching an Alabama game, and his mother of sheer loneliness and grief, everyone reckoned. His small family home melded gradually into a comfortable blend of old and new as he replaced Irene’s twenty-year old curtains, added more and more bookshelves, and planted a few white peony bushes around the house. Books, cats, and peonies. This pretty much summed up Clive’s life, until now. Until Dolly.

“Excuse me, but I’m hoping you can help me find a copy of May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude. Do you know it?” The voice resonated in normal tones; it possessed nothing out of the ordinary that would cause Clive’s seventy-two year-old heart to quicken in unfamiliar flutters. But there it was. Extraordinary. Clive turned around from helping a young patron discover the card catalog and faced the owner of the voice. She was, he guessed, approximately sixty-fiveish, all of five feet tall, and topped by a head full of thick, white hair, the kind of white that glows in its good health. Her face radiated good genes, calm intelligence and an agreeable humor. Clive had never seen her before and he was instantly curious before he could stop himself.

“Of course, I’ll be happy to get that for you, Mrs....?” His voice trailed off in the question he hoped would have an encouraging answer.

“Waycross. Dolly Waycross. I’m new to Waterloo, you see. My husband passed about two years ago, and I inherited a small house here belonging to his family that up to now has been tied up in probate. To me, a house doesn’t seem like a home until you get a few library books scattered around just begging to be read. Don’t you agree? I have always found Miss Sarton’s views on solitude to be of comfort, in a sad sort of way, if you know what I mean, and I’d love to be able to read it again, especially now that I am experiencing true solitude myself.”

Clive just gaped. Dolly snuck a quick glance at his nameplate on the desk. “Mr. Mighty?” she prompted gently. Clive smiled, recovered, and grasped his chin with a weathered hand in a lifelong gesture of contemplation, appearing to be gathering thoughts of great weight. “Ah yes, of course. Right this way, Mrs. Waycross. I know just where it is.” She’s alone, she’s lovely, and she’s new in town. Oh my. Oh my indeed.

He guided her toward the appropriate stack and Clive prayed that the book was in so he could prove his library was efficient, sufficient for every need, that he was able to grant her every wish. He conversely prayed it was not in, giving him a reason to perhaps call her when it was returned, and maybe he could even bring it to her house. It was in.

“Here you go," Clive murmured as he handed over the book to a pleased Dolly. “Will there be anything else?” Before he could stop himself, he blurted, “With your being new to town and all, I’d be honored, I mean, I’d be happy to show you around. If you like, that is. Being a stranger in town can be a little intimidating I would imagine. But I don’t want to appear forward, Mrs. Waycross, I just thought...” He stopped and looked at her helplessly, the old familiar freeze creeping in to lock up the knees, empty the brain, twist the tongue. He waited for the inevitable refusal. It wouldn’t be haughty, combined with a cruel laugh and a wave of the hand as with the girls of his youth; no, it would be kinder perhaps, with more consideration and respect that comes with age, but still a reminder of long forgotten pain.

She looked startled for only a minute. “Well, I think that’s a mighty good offer,” she said, smiling at her little pun on his name. “I really am just finding my way around and any help in learning the town’s shortcuts would be very much appreciated.” Lightly touching his arm she leaned in a little, allies in a private war, and quipped, “At our age, we should look for all the shortcuts we can get.” She beamed warmly at him, blissfully unaware of the thaw-effect her easy consent had produced in the man.

Finding his voice, he responded with a growing steadiness, “I think I know just the ticket - what are you doing??? - we’ll go on a walking tour of Waterloo -am I really saying this?- and I’ll be sure to include the all important Citizen Summary, just so you know who’s who and what’s what.”

“Citizen Summary?” Dolly asked, placing a hand over her chest in mock dismay. “You mean...”

“Yep,” conspired Clive, immensely enjoying the way this conversation was proceeding. “You will come to know all of Waterloo’s deepest and darkest; the surliest waitress at Margo’s Courthouse Cafe, the slowest bank teller, poor Shirley, at Fidelity Union, the friendliest and fastest check-out line at the Piggly Wiggly and the best days for sales at Winston and Waggler’s department store. There are certain nights when it’s best to avoid the teen-infested town square and there are certain glorious weeks when Lou’s Creek rushes with the fresh water of a new season.” Oh, there is so much, so much more. He paused, suddenly aware that he had been prattling like a town gossip, which also reminded him to add Winifred Snipps to Dolly’s need-to-know list. He felt glorious, he felt terrified; he felt - Alive.

Dolly, obviously pleased with both Clive and his suggestion, replied in an excited whisper, “ Sounds marvelous. When do we go?”

Clive winked and said, “Well, first we need to get you a library card so you can check out that book of yours.”

Looking down at the book in her hand, she chuckled. “Heavens, I almost forgot about that little bit of business. I’ll definitely be needing a card, seeing as how I’ll be a frequent patron of your fine library. Reading just fills one up to the brim with contentment, I’ve always said, and it brings me such happiness knowing I have a book waiting for me every day. I do believe, Mr. Mighty, that both your library and your kindly offered tour have made my welcome here a truly memorable one.” Dolly extended her unoccupied hand in thanks.

He grasped the hand as if it was a promise that might be broken at any moment and gently murmured a soft, “I’m so glad.” They walked back to the information desk so Dolly could fill out the paperwork and obtain her library card, sharing a companionable silence; each in private wonder at the slight, but definitely noticeable current zipping along their veins, the kind of current that new hope can bring.

Clive handed Dolly her new card, making sure he noted her address information before filing it away. He spoke first. “I don’t work at the library tomorrow. Would that be too soon for your Waterloo walk? It’s a Thursday and Thursdays are when Al puts all the meat on sale at the Piggly. I mean, we can’t miss that.” Clive smiled, relaxed and easy in her company.

“I think tomorrow would be perfect.” Dolly replied as they headed toward the front doors of the library. “And maybe after, you would consider coming over for some lemonade and a game of Scrabble. I’ve always loved Scrabble; it allows me to play with words, and I think words are just endlessly fascinating. Don’t you? ”

Clive held the front library door open for her as she prepared to step into the morning. “Why yes,” he replied warmly as she faced him for his answer. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

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Quote of the day: The floor was littered with crumpled carnations of drawing paper. Michael Chabon - "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Chosen for that perfect image of crumpled, tossed paper as carnations. I've crumpled up a pile of paper in my time - I love using carnations as a counterpoint to the frustration those crumpled pieces of paper represent.

4-1 Writing Exercise - Another Short-short

The Hat (first draft, needs work)

"Lawsy Lord," Odi sighed to herself as she pushed open the dressing room door. "Here we goes again." She felt the familiar resistance of something or someone behind the door and, with a final, urgent shove of her stronger-than-she-looks Olive Oyl frame, the door gave way, pushing a large pile of the days wardrobe to the side. Odi surveyed the remains of last night's revels. "Lordie, all them white movie folks. What a mess they done left for ol' Odi." As she began the thankless job of recreating order in the chaos of Fred Astaire's dressing room, she found her mind wandering to the same place it always did. She imagined her legs, bent by childhood polio, now strong and sure, moving to the rhythms of an orchestral swell, spinning and tapping her across a stage in a wild and joyful dance.

As she daydreamed, she spotted Mr. Astaire's famous top hat, normally stiff and shiny, on a chair near the dressing table where it probably spent the night crushed underneath used champagne bottles and drunken movie stars. Clsoing the door to any prying eyes of other maids who might pass by, Odi slowly reached for the famous hat, hardly believing her good luck at finding it here. Usually Mr. Astaire's wardrobe assistant, Estelle, was fanatical about her costume checklists, but she must have missed the hat under all the party debri.

Odi's curiosity and desire overwhelmed her better sense and after puffing out the hat back to it's proper shape, she placed it jauntily on her head. As if waiting for some mystical transference to take place, she gazed at herself in the large dressing table mirror, turned on the small rounded makeup lights surrounding the mirror, and willed herself to hear the distant music of her long imagined dance. Oh, to be taken in a man's arms and match him step for step on two strong legs with a life of their own, swirling in a delirious dance of grace and joy. Wearing the hat, she could almost, almost get there.

It was just one hat, all crumpled and ruined. Maybe Mr. Astaire wouldn't miss it. She reverently removed it and placed it in her large daybag she used for her change of clothes. For the first time in years at this studio, she couldn't wait for her bus ride home.

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Quote of the day: When I am an old woman, so that too much queerness will seem a natural thing, I mean to build a tower like it on my side of the lake, and I shall sit there on angry days and growl down at anyone who disturbs me. Marjorie K. Rawlings - "Cross Creek"
Chosen because I love the image and the sentiment it expresses. I, too, have felt this freeing sensation that growing older brings. And I also am familiar with the desire to "growl down" as well. Grin.