So Serious Saturday #17

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type: Journal/Inspirational

More Than My Strength

     I stood before a plastic crate. The nurse placed rounds of metal weights inside: twenty-five pounds, twenty-five more, another . the first had been easy to lift. The second became heavy, but I managed to transfer it to the counter.

     The nurse distributed the weight of seventy-five pounds, over half of my body weight, in the crate on the cart. I did not know how I was going to pass this test. Small strength and mobility exercises between me and full-time employment seemed child's play now.

     My core muscles tightened over the memory of the last round of weights. Surely God would not let me go all this way through a process an let me fail now.

     The nurse nodded. "Now," he said.

Highway Fifteen

              I had fifteen minutes to get everything Mom wanted from the store.  The low brick building, flat like all other buildings in Barstow, wasn’t too far from our rented house, actually, but in this wind I wasn’t making headway.  Being tall and gangly was my strongest asset, whether it was easy placement on the volleyball team or getting picked first for the point guy, but today my dimensions were an issue.

...Grand-Anna

Grand-Anna

Page 3 of 3

I pulled myself up and turned so that my back reflected in the wide mirror. Grand-Anna readjusted her seat, never removing her eyes from mine. My hands gripped the edge of the counter as I placed my weight on them.

“The mist hid the danger. Even if it hadn’t been misting, the darkness of that early hour could have been fatal.” Her eyes left me as she said this. Internally, I breathed relief. My eyes freely wandered over her poofy hair to the window, where the tree drooped and the trunk was lined with creases and carvings, some natural and some from us kids.

As if to contrast my view with that morning’s she said, “At least I had my headlights on; although what good that did I don’t know.”

... Grand-Anna ...

Grand-Anna

Page 2 of 3

I saw the thin line running over the length of her thin thigh. “I want to hear how it happened,” I said.

She nodded and put a finger to her chin. Then she smiled and said, “Yes, I think I can tell you.”

I stood and waited. I let the damp towel drop from my fading pink hands, but Grand-Anna stayed quiet.

“Auntie, can I get you anything?” I said. I wondered if she had forgotten where she left off – she could do that as easily as misplacing her house keys.

Grand-Anna ...

Grand-Anna

Page 1 of 3

            Us kids called her Grand-Anna when she was thirty-two. She started walking slower and began to forget her keys in the shower, the sink, and twice in the toaster. She wrote letters to relatives as if they were friends and asked her friends over for weekly bingo night.

I walked in on her one time in the bathroom and she did not object. She only glanced up from her Chicken Soup for the Soul reader and told me not to be embarrassed.

            I started to wash the grit out of the creases in my fingers. My brother Matthew was using the other sink after our foolhardy adventures outside. When I glanced up in the landscape mirror I saw Anna still looking at me over her reading glasses – not bifocals, not yet.

His Father Was

A real swell guy
with an open laugh,
entertaining kids and
other teachers on staff.

In body and spirit
he remained strong,
telling loud stories
both funny and long.

Everyone called him
"Coach" for short,
because he spent hours
with youths of all sport.

Coach lived in
the field, court, and gym.
No wonder Dad rarely
passed time with him.

Pantoum: Quality of Life

Home is where the heart is,
but what if you can't find your heart?
Mother should be discharged soon, but
you spend days searching for black coffee.

But what if you can't find your heart
at the bottom of the bitter grinds
of the black coffee you spend days searching for
instead of waiting by her bed?

Toward the bottom of the bitter grinds
you remember you left your purse
by her bed -- instead of waiting --
where Samuel and his children have stayed.

You remember: you left. Your purse
sits idly by the ammonia-drenched wall
where Samuel and his children have stayed
and helped the nurse move Mother.

Sitting idly by the ammonia-drenched wall,
you fold your fingers around dissipating warmth,
and the nurse helping move Mother
literally asks you if you want to help.

You fold your fingers around dissipated warmth
the checkered styrofoam cannot give you.
Internally, you ask if you want to help
the ninety-year-old shell learn to come home.

Craft Wednesday #15 Soup du Langue

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you.  

Soup du Langue

Why is the plural of hoof "hooves", but the plural of roof is not "rooves"*?  If the English language was a person she would say, "Because I said so, that's why."

The history of a language can really be boiled down to who conquered whom. The English language is a mix of German, French, and some Latin for various historical and monarchical reasons. That is probably why it demands a word taken from one language be changed one way and a similar sounding word that is actually from another language asks to be treated a different way. 

Lots of English language words are confusing, but especially when they change tense. Present-tense "take" becomes "took". "All right," a young child often thinks, "Then 'bake' becomes 'book' and 'cake' becomes 'cook.'" Never mind that cake is (usually) a noun, except when speaking about how mud got "caked" onto your favorite sneakers.

And I thought Spanish was difficult in its conjugations -- for many words I wanted to use I have forgotten how to alter their root when they change tense. But every language I can read because of its basic Latin alphabet has its own conjugations. 

The answer for that is to just try to memorize the words that have special conjugations, just as my Spanish teachers urged me to do. For English, with its intermixing of different systems, the task can be daunting. No wonder English is one of the most difficult second languages to learn.

Changing word tense and number in any language may be scary.

Be careful when conjugating!

The Crowded House

The city sleeps under the peeling plaster ceiling --
piles upon piles of shoebox tenements and Tupperware garages.
Dustbunnies, spiders, and stale cracker crumbs

A Unicorn's Tale, Part 7

7.

     He skipped from one front hoof to the other, from the front to the back, and from the back to the front again. “Follow me, I know a great place we can practice.”
     I stopped coughing and followed Larry to the street where we would spend most of our remaining months together when he wasn’t gambling with candy and I wasn’t working for Mikey. Yeah, I was a bouncer, but I also did some odd jobs: running candy across the ocean, learning how to teal at the tables, and once being a bodyguard. But that’s another story. I’ll just say I met a lot of strange and interesting unicorns and began to break out of my shell a bit. I started asking for things, and telling some things.
      Anyway, Mikey heard we were practicing in front of human bars in the entertainment district. He approved. He even joined us a couple of times and gave some great pointers.

So Serious Saturday #16

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type: Opinion/Philosophical

Setting an Example (For the Young Ones)

A boy walking in the street tugged on his dad’s hand and pointed at me as I rode by on my shiny steed. “Look! Look! She’s good,” he exclaimed.

My courteous smile at the dad grew larger as my ear caught his child’s comment. I whizzed past on my bicycle as though I were showing off. I thought about what he had seen: a young adult, semi-autonomous, alone, having both excellent control and blurring speed on two wheels. I know a younger me would have been impressed, too.

Candle, Dragon

Mother saw my new eyes
contemplating the candle flame.
You were that once, she said.
 
A candle? I asked.

No, a flame.
Your brother is an ember now.
 
I touched her massive stomach,
where his foot or his fist kicked
at my imprudence. I looked into her
shining eyes -- suddenly damp -- and asked,
Are you a dragon?

Then she was laughing and crying,
sobbing and laughing.
No, she said.
I am the happy candle.

Why aren't you a dragon? I demanded.

She smoothed my hair and said, Sweetie,
a dragon keeps a flame inside,
unless she makes it a weapon.
A candle lets her flame be seen
and even shared.

Old Laughing Times, Section 4

   “A bundle of tablecloths.  Or that’s what I thought at first.  Underneath the pile of red gingham came a bossy sort of voice: ‘Out of my way!’ The short girl pushed her way past me, into the back seat cramped up between the frame and the front seats.  Her patched coinpurse ripped open, all her hard earned money fell into the gutter with barely a splash.  Time seemed to slow down before a wave – yes, a wave in the street – came and whoosh! There went her hard-earned livelihood.  Oh, she was crying fit to contend with the clouds.

Craft Wednesday #14 Overflow of the Heart

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you.  

Overflow of the Heart

Writers sometimes have to urge to write about some very specific event or about a strong, sometimes ambiguous, emotion. When writers write these deepest thoughts of their heart they speak to whomever will read their written words.

The Disappointment in Purgatory

Other boys snickered at my books
and the way I carried Thoreau in the halls
to cover my eggplant face or to distract my pillbug eyes
from what they saw, both inner and outer.
I answered the questions the Misses put to me
about Du Bois, angles, and prepositional phrases.

Boys like Allen Bradley hated
my guts. At P.E. they roared
as they pelted me with basketballs
I never had a prayer of catching.
It was a new kind of revelation
that wasn't included in the curriculum.

School was okay, though, and mostly
my classes -- even the bad ones -- were a heaven
away from disappointment and being useless,
from a father's belly shouts
as if the sky were breaking in the preamble
to a hailstorm, the thunder before the lightning
and the great flash as it fell.

Old Laughing Times, Section 3

“She sure was.  My dear Cynthia was the best cook there ever was.  Why, did you know that she once prepared a meal for one of the Queen of England’s relatives?  It was some sort of exotic meat, I think, a miniature horse native to some small South Pacific nation.  Though she told me the creature was so thick that at first she thought it was a baby elephant.  Then she realized that it didn’t have a trunk, but instead it had one of those long sorts of noses with white markings just like a horseshoe.  In fact, she declared that it was exactly like my lucky mark.”

Marge rubbed the back of her hands against her lap slowly.  Her companion asked, “Is that true?”

So Serious Saturday #15

Fiction needs a basis in reality. Exercising non-fiction muscles once in a while benefits an active imagination, channeling creative energies as it focuses on a subject. So Serious Saturdays will be an active place for critical essays or writing about reality in the context of real events - even when it is not written on Saturdays.

Type:News/Informational

I’ve Got a Golden Ticket

My social network brought and interesting piece of news to my attention. Somewhere in Florida a husband and wife duo stand accused of selling “golden tickets to heaven.”

Among their claims is that Jesus gave them the tickets to see so that they could make a profit and pay for transportation to a planet made of drugs. I would say they are already halfway there. Even stranger is that some people actually bought those golden tickets.

A Glance Is A Spark

My mother taught me how babies were formed.
First a man and a woman fall in love, she said.
I imagined that time I fell into a pool
at my cousin Reyna's house and almost drowned.
It sounds painful, I said.
My mother's eyes sagged, but her lips smiled.
It can be, she said.
Then what? I asked.
Well, she said slowly.
Well what?

Her eyes searched for something;
they grabbed onto one of the votives
with which she had dotted the house.
She said, They make a spark.
 
Years later I learned how dangerous
electricity and water were together
and something of fatal passion,
but then her answer awed me
and I could not wait to
ignite a small life into being.

Old Laughing Times, Section 2

          “Hallo!” he called cheerfully.  “What pretty girls there are today!”

            Marge feigned surprise and looked around.  “What?  I don’t see any girls.  They must be in the bird cage.”

            “Do you mean a couple of chicks?” Mr. Averstand guffawed.  “Sure, sure, they’re cute.  But honestly” – he grinned a grinned that would have fluttered the heart of even a woman a few decades younger – “can you imagine having to put up with all that squawking?  The feathers alone would tickle me baby pink.”

Craft Wednesday #13 Different Ways of Learning

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you.  

Different Ways of Learning

A child is systematically taught to read. Adults also take courses that present information step by step.

One can teach knowledge because it follows an order, but one cannot teach intuition, which is instantaneous perception without logical and conscious thought.

Old Laughing Times, Section 1

     The two old friends sat on the bench in the bright sunshine and laughed.  A bird with brilliant green plumage cocked its head, beating wings against the large mesh metal fence.

            “Ah,” Suzanne sighed, wiping a tear from her sparkling eyes.  Her hunched chest still heaved breathlessly.  “That’s too much.”

None Alone Five, Continued: The Battle

5 1/2.

The Battle

No doubt this was the right place; a wide chasm and rocky cliffs and a sea of bodies. The side rushing forward was our forces pressing forward, and I saw Cameron up ahead, helping someone up, her mouth open and moving and noiseless from the clanging around me, the clash of sword on shield and blade striking blood.

I turned my gaze to see the sky clouded over with black and purple bodies, but a dry crackle beneath my boots caused me to look instead at how the ground lay spread with skulls and ribs. And it wasn't just under me, either. Ten thousand warriors rushing ten thousand strides forward made the same noise as their boots struck the terrain, raising sharp pops like everyone was going through hedges set between the land of the living and the land of the dead.

Flames shot over my head. The person just behind me had blocked it with a shield. Where's mine, I thought, where's my shield. The volley changed directions, and I saw they weren't arrows, not exactly, but more of the living nightmares, as I called them, with the sharp spines and armored stomachs, the pointed teeth and the tails like scorpions. But they didn't kill you when their barbs went into you. They just made you feel as though you deserved to.

And they changed direction again, and I heard the hum, and nothing else mattered. Looming larger and larger they were now near enough that I could see their faces.