The Cost of Avoidance

I have a plethora of nieces and nephews scattered around in different states. Not a single one lives close. Logistics being what they are, I don’t know these kids as well as I’d like to. Sure there are a few of the older ones on Facebook and we enjoy that strange and distant virtual closeness that’s so part of today’s culture. But the younger ones—well, our relationship is reduced to those two phone calls a year: “Thanks for the birthday/Christmas gift, Auntie Linda.”  Followed by a brief, somewhat formal conversation. Far from the tight relationship I enjoyed with my own aunts and uncles when I was growing up. Heck, they and my parents were practically interchangeable.  

Anyway I’ve fallen into the habit of getting all these kids the same thing for Christmas. There’s two parts to my gift. The first (and in my humble opinion, the best part) is a signed book from one of the writers conferences I attend earlier in the year. I try to find a book and author who would be best for each of my nieces and nephews at their particular ages. And I love doing this for them. I like to think that I’m being a good auntie by introducing them to such greats as John Scieszka and Norton Juster, Judy Blume and M.T. Anderson. I can only hope that the kids appreciate these personally signed books as much as their obligatory thank you call implies!

But, since I can never be sure, there’s the second part to my gift—a small gift card usually to Walmart where they can buy anything they want. But this year I decided to avoid the big monolith. And I did my Christmas shopping at local vendors and shops wherever I could. Which was all well and good. But what to do about those gift cards? Running short on time (all these things have to be packaged up and mailed) I ended up deciding on Visa Gift Cards. What I learned is that, unlike Walmart gift cards, the Visa ones cost $3.95 each! Basically I had to pay for money? Which, of course, is ridiculous and I will never do again.

Did I mention how I like to wrap them up all cute before sending them off?  

Anyway . . . next year’s gifts to the distant sibling and sibling-in-law offspring will look a little different. Sure, there will still be the books . . .  personally signed by authors I meet. But there is likely to be far less plastic involved.    

I Got Nothing

Sometimes words pour forth from this head of mine. Like a mountain stream, they tumble and tumble over one another faster than the rest of me can keep up. They come to me in my sleep, haunt me in the shower, and interrupt me mid-speech. They wait for me to position myself such that I can bring them to life, to spring from my fingertips, joyful and alive! Other times they still come, a tad more laboriously, but they still come. There for the taking, they are, like ripe cherries hanging from a tree in front of my face, waiting to be plucked.

But today, I got nothing. It’s as if the very stillness I seek as I sit on my meditation cushion has found me instead. It’s seeped in through my ear holes, snuck in through my eye sockets and crept through the nasal passages up, up, up straight into the old noggin, settling there like some flaccid idea. It waited until I was focused elsewhere (or rather nowhere which is the goal of meditation) then crept in to replace the synapses that used to find a playground in these folds of dark grey matter. Today my mountain stream has dried up. It’s more like an arid wasteland in there with nary a breath of wind to stir up a thing worth sharing.

So that’s all I got to say today. Nothing. I got nothing.

First Draft Writing

I listened to a talk once given by a successful novel writer. There was a key phrase he used, went something like this: "Don’t Get it Right, Get it Written." The gist of the discussion was to just sit down and do it: pound out the story and get it all down on paper. Then, after you’ve done that, go back through it again and again and again . . . And again if necessary.

I have done exactly that, but only with short story where the beginning and ending can be belted out in a single sitting. But never have I done it with a longer piece. In fact with my longer pieces, I tend to write a chapter or two that lead in a preconceived direction. Then I go back and edit, edit, edit until I feel good about that chunk of work. Only then do I go forward, following that process chapter by chapter until I am done. It seemed to work perfectly for the first book I wrote and so I began using the same process to write my second.

And yet, there’s something I just discovered about my writing. The book I’m writing now has a few complicated themes running along simultaneously, some subliminal and some conspicuous. And it plays around with time and space while mingling dissimilar cultures. In order to pull it all off, I’ll need to tie up any dangling ends and solve any problems I create for myself along the way. Because of that, just sitting down and writing willy-nilly seemed problematic. I kept wondering whether I’d end up writing myself into a corner, one I couldn’t back out of. So I took a day and wrote a complete, lengthy synopsis of the plot, the characters’ agendas, the complexity of the setting, etc., etc. “There,” I thought, “now I know all that I need to know. All I have to do is fill the characters with life and crack open the scenes.”

But the minute I started to do it, I felt stymied, as if the story no longer held any interest for me. I realized that, by blowing it all out like that, I’d spoiled the surprises for myself. As ridiculous as it sounds, I realized that in writing, I want to be both writer and reader, waiting in anticipation to see what the characters will do next. I want to be amazed and shocked as I turn the blank page and watch the words come stumbling or leaping onto the paper. I want the protagonist to find his or her own way without the writer holding a lantern at the end of the path. And I want the writer to let loose of the reins and allow the characters to have their heads.

It was somewhat of an epiphany and I realized that there are a number of “stops and starts” living here in my laptop, stories that had suffered a similar fate. I’d gotten excited about something and started in on it, all the while having a clear sight to the ending. But time after time, I’d lost interest, abandoning my poor protagonists to their unfinished fates. The more I thought about it, the more I recalled that author’s words: “Don’t get it Right, get it Written” and I wondered whether the process I’ve employed in the past simply doesn’t work the way I thought it would. Maybe I need to take that detailed synopsis I wrote and do what a friend suggested – “Print it out, Linda. And then rip it into tiny shreds and burn it. This will give your subconscious permission to run willy-nilly over the pages again.”

Well, she didn’t put it exactly that way, but I got her meaning. And I think tonight I'll have a little ritualistic bon fire.

It's Sunday night - do you know where your characters are?

Mine are still in my laptop. Tapping their fingers and waiting. Poor Theo probably thinks I've abandoned him altogether, left him stranded in that alternate reality he mistakenly stepped into the night before last. I guess if I think about it, it was the night before last for Theo but for me it was over a month ago. At any rate, he's still in there, ignored, forgotten, left to find his own way in that strange land.

But hey, at least I didn't leave him alone. Last I saw of him, he'd met up with a boy about his own age named Jayes and the two of them had put their heads together to come up with a plan to get Theo back home.

However, (and isn't there always a however?), unbeknownst to either of them, there are questionable characters lurking in the hard drive of my laptop. And they have no desire whatsoever to get Theo back home. And they certainly don't want Jayes to learn the secret to how Theo came to be there in the first place!

I suppose, if I were any sort of a writer, I'd get back in there and warn the boys before it's too late. Instead, I'm here, cowering in this blog, writing about them instead of for them. Shame on me! Shame, shame, shame.

Okay, that's enough self flagellation. I'm going in after them. Wish me luck!

Poetry in Motion

When I was young I used to write poetry. Sometimes silly, sometimes serious, always rhyming, and usually about life or love or tormented emotions. I still have the originals somewhere, stuffed into a three ring binder. I'd even given copies to my little sister once years and years and years ago. Back when I was dirt poor. It was a year when I couldn't afford to buy Christmas gifts so I'd made them all. To Lilly, I'd given the gift of poetry. Little did I know that all that bad, horrible writing would come back to haunt me one day!

My mother had been gone for about a year when a bunch of us siblings got together for a shindig in Reno, NV. It was then that my baby sister (now forty four), presented me with her own gift of poetry. She'd taken all my old poems and had them professionally bound. There was a dedication page signed by my two sisters, my daughter, and posthumously by my mother (Lilly had lifted her signature off of a greeting card that she'd also saved). And one of the poems was even illustrated by my daughter, the artist. So there were all my sappy, rhyming love poems, bound beautifully into twelve hardback copies. What could I do but thank her for them. In fact, I think I even cried. But had I cried for the thoughtfulness of the gift or the fact that all that wonderful giving had been spent on such crappy poetry? In truth I think it was a little of both.

I still dabble in poetry from time to time but it's very different than the flowery, Hallmark stuff I'd written as a teen. Again, I save them all, stored away for some big, future event that probably will never happen. But now the repository is my computer instead of a binder. Some are finished, others are in a folder I simply call, Poetry in Motion. These are the ones I come back to and tweak off and on. Eventually, I might edit one enough for it to feel complete, or at least as close to complete as I think it'll ever get. Then I'll move it into another folder called Poetry. But the contents of that folder is light years away from what can be found in my three ring binder. An example of my more recent musings:

God’s Gifts

Coaxing
mold into a
petri-dish
He cultured up
Pasteur.

Crunched some
numbers to the sum
of Pythagoras.

Scribbled out
the first and
original
Picasso.

Pondered up
Plato and Socrates.

Ignored Aristotle.

Then,
throwing in a
monkey wrench
God created
Darwin.

He must have
laughed thinking
“this should keep
them busy
for a while.”

© 2009, Linda Leschak, all rights reserved

Rubbed Out

Inspired by Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell

I wanted to use my body differently this time, to make more of my stay here than I had before. But I got caught up in it again, forgot to remember. And all too soon I was just another suburban soccer mom spending each day the way I’d spent the last and believing in my mind that this was living.

But my heart didn’t buy it. In my deepest conviction, I knew I was wasting my time again. And now I’ve been doing it for years. And this human body is giving out. I’ll have to trade it in soon, some sleek new model, one that comes with a blank slate; except, of course, for the ingrain ideologies that every new body is born with. Too bad those ideals get rubbed out by parents and teachers and by social expectations, all just doing what they beleive is right. And too bad evolution has managed to grow the left hemisphere of the brain beyond the capacity of the right. It seems even now that the intuitive side shrinks with each new generation. Or at least the use of it does, while the left grows stronger, stronger in the notion that knowledge is more important than insight. What’s that phrase? Oh yeah, knowledge is power. Power, what the hell is that anyway but a trumped up, overrated goal? If only we could cling to the ingrain memories, we’d remember that power is nothing more than a need to control. And if we clung to what we need to know, we’d remember that control is something we truly never have.

Nevertheless, the left hemisphere has grown heavy while the right side subordinates. The storage space for our ingrain memories shrinks exponentially until soon the ability to pass them along will be thwarted entirely. And therein will lie the rub.

Personification - where the world turns human

Take that clock over there, the one up on the wall above the table. It’s been hanging there forever, staring at me with that blank look on its flat face as it ticks away the seconds of my life with its right hand, the hours with its left. Damn thing, sometimes I’ll glance up quick enough to find it smirking at me. Then it’ll catch itself and wipe its face back into a mask of unconcern. But I know. I know that it spends whole days just staring, judging, tapping its fingers as I take way too much time writing.

Anyway, I like personification. It can be an interesting way to breathe life (real life) into a scene or story. Take for example:

A Possibility

Earth mother spins lazily on her haunches allowing her occupants equal time with their father. Some of them suffer, wishing to remain in the dark where they can enjoy the tranquil beauty of the niece rather than be subjected to the hotheaded fury of the father. He’s always had such an explosive temper!

Earth mother knows all about her husband’s volatile moods. And yet sometimes even she loses her cool, becomes angry at the behavior of the occupants. Like the time when the carnivores had gotten the upper hand and were bullying the rest into extinction. Look how she handled that! All she needed to do was let her guard down just a bit and glance the other way as the meteor hurtled toward her, hitting her midsection with the ferocity of . . . well, a meteor. That had certainly stirred the pot, hadn’t it?

But now it looks like the same thing is happening again, the need for intervention, a wakeup call to the new inhabitants. She needs to let them know that they are overstepping the boundaries of their pants . . . or is it “getting too big for their britches?” Ah yes, it’s the latter; she’s always liked that phrase, happy she’d picked it up one afternoon as another mother stood looking up into the face of her teenage son, shaking her finger and scolding.

Too big for their britches indeed. It’s time for some lessons, lessons from a mother who knows no language, one who communicates through action. So she’ll intensify the fury of the storm god Baal, melt the polar caps, raise the tides and reduce the value of beachfront property. Then she’ll wait patiently to see if that gets their attention. It should. After all, these inhabitants seem much wiser than their scaly predecessors.

Earth Mother hopes she’s right. She hates the idea of having to start all over - again.

Memoirs in Second Person

It’s Monday, Labor Day and the rest of the vacationers are nowhere in sight. Sleeping in, perhaps. Hungover, no doubt. You’d be sleeping in too if not for the alarm on your cell phone, set to roust you out early enough to get a head start on the rest of them.

There seems to be only one other person awake besides you, a woman standing between the heavy stilts that support her beach rental. Indeed, the only homes this close to the water that managed to survive Ike are the stilted ones, set at least eight feet high. This is the kind you rented and it’s what the woman rented whose now outside, calling her dog. The two cars parked under her rental look packed, poised and ready to put an end to the long weekend. She calls the dog. From this distance, it sounds like the name is Lobo or Hobo and when you finally see the object of her attention you think how fitting the latter name would be. A tiny, white fluff scurries from around the nearest house and then stands about a hundred yards away, ears perked, tail wagging. Even from the distance of three houses and two floors up, you see the dog’s expression. And when the woman repeats her summons, Hobo bounds toward her, bouncing his way through the bushes to run circles around her legs. She carries her coffee cup back upstairs with tiny Hobo tight at her heels.

There are a few cars already vying for position on the beach. There’s even an early bird fisherman wading hip deep in the surf, his pole slanting downward as he tries catching the silvery carp you saw flashing across the water last evening. You smile as you recall the one, how it took six hops up into the air before abandoning its earthbound dream. You remember how you laughed, wondering what could prompt such abandoned glee in the life of a fish.

You hear the neighbors stirring, filtering out onto the deck for some quiet conversation before their gaggle of children wake up. You’ve already decided that they are a strange group. Not by the fact that they have a herd of small children between the handful of women you’ve seen. But by the fact that there are no men; at least not any frequent ones. You remember seeing men only three times the entire weekend: once to fill the ice chest on the deck when they first arrived, another to cook on the grill downstairs and a third to empty the ice chest on Sunday night. But even during these chance sightings, none of the women were present. You recall seeing the children on the beach, romping through the surf while the women guarded from the shore. But even then, the men were nowhere in sight. From your place of silent observation you’ve concluded that, aside from the obvious coupling required to produce the gaggle of children, there is no gender interaction in the adjoining beach house and you wonder whether it’s some kind of cult.

You’re grateful for the fact that one of the women has yet to join this morning’s gathering – the one with the laugh so ridiculous you actually wonder whether she’s been pretending all weekend. It’s sort of a hee-haw guffaw that makes you laugh every time you hear it. But not for the same reasons. You think of tomorrow, of all the things waiting for you back home. And you’re torn between a desire to stay here, sitting alone on the deck watching the sea move in and out, the pelicans swooping low over the surf as you listen to the cadence of the gulls chattering in the distance, or to go back home, return to your “normal” existence, leaving this weekend as some perfect memory.

As it turns out, nothing is perfect - at least not forever. You hear the neighbor join the others on the porch and her goofy laugh drives you inside. Time now to shake the last of the sand out of your clothes, pack up your own two dogs, your husband and your son and head on back to life.