Weird Thing

This is weird. Today I was thinking about Death of a Salesman, and how I love that play. It's been forever since I saw it or read it. "I should read that again sometime soon" I thought to myself. 

Then tonight I log onto Writer's Almanac. I don't check it much. Somehow the poetry is not the same in my head as it is when Garrison Keillor reads it on air, with a voice that is only his. I scroll to the bottom and read this:

It's the birthday of Arthur Miller, (books by this author) born in New York City in 1915. His family was wealthy, but they lost all their money during the stock market crash, so they moved to Brooklyn and lived with the whole extended family. Arthur's uncle was a storyteller and a big liar. He became an inspiration for Arthur, who said, "His unpredictable manipulations of fact freed my mind to lope and skip among fantasies of my own." While Arthur Miller was writing his playDeath of a Salesman (1949), he went to bed at night and realized that his face was wet from crying, and his throat was sore from speaking and shouting the lines of dialogue as he wrote. He said, "The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."

Hmmmm. Weird. 

Amazon.com

Never get on Amazon late at night when you promised yourself you'd be writing your own masterpiece. It will only make you regret not buying a copy of The Underneath when you had a chance, even though it seemed like too much money at the time. Now it's been nominated for a national book award and you (meaning I) haven't read it. It's written by Kathi Appelt who was at the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop this past summer. When she read from her memoir My Father's Summers I gasped audibly because the writing was that good. Audible gasping good. It takes a lot for me to gasp audibly, believe me. Oh, I do love writing that makes me gasp. It's sort of like a cross between tasting the world's finest chocolate and having the wind knocked out of you. 

Unintentional Mistakes

Growing up there were three apple trees in our backyard. I loved one tree the most. It's apples were red--not yellow and green like the others. The apples from that tree were crisp and tart, unlike any apples I've ever tasted. After a good frost they were cold and juicier than before. 

One day, as a child, I found a small knife. It was silver with a pearl handle. Unlike the pocket knives my father used to cut string from hay bales, this knife didn't fold up. I liked the way the knife felt in my hands. I liked using it. It was light and comfortable. I took that knife and began stripping the bark off the apple tree--my favorite tree. 

I stripped long strings of bark from the trunk and main branch. I watched the bark curl, exposing the fleshy wood underneath. I thought nothing of it, until my parents found me knife in hand, carving into the tree. They were not happy. What was I thinking? 

My parents explained that stripping the bark from the tree had made it vulnerable. I'd exposed it to disease, to insects, to the elements. The tree, they said, would probably die. I cried and cried. I loved that tree. I loved its apples. I hadn't meant it any harm. I hadn't understood that I was doing something wrong. 

It was the first time that I remember making a big mistake without realizing I was making one. Until that point I honestly thought that I'd have a clear understanding of my choices; that I'd always clearly know wrong from right. Instead I'd made an unintentional mistake.

The tree lived. For many, many years it bore the scar I gave it. It may still, although I think it's grown over. I still love the apples from that tree. I wonder how many unintentional mistakes I've made throughout my life, and I wonder when I'll realize that I've made them. I only hope it won't be too late. 

Bedtime Chats

My oldest daughter and I like to have bedtime chats. I snuggle down next to her in bed and we talk. Well, we did. About the time my tummy was too big with the baby and I was too uncomfortable to duck under the bunk bed our bedtime chats stopped. 

Tonight we had one again. She told me about her day: school, how she doesn't like computer class, and how she made a tote bag at enrichment tonight. (Someone took my girls to mother/daughter night--how nice). 

Since our new baby was asleep in his crib, I ducked down and we talked. It was nice. It really has been hard with a new baby to give my girls some one on one time. Tonight, though, at least I tried. When I said goodnight and left her room I had a full 30 seconds before the baby started crying. At least, though, there was time for a bedtime chat.  Sleep tight.

Ineptitude

 My husband and I know so little about computers that we shouldn't even own them. The same goes for cars, and probably houses. Our PC is currently AWOL. I have no idea how to fix it. I'm afraid trying will only make it worse. 

One of our cars needs to be fixed before winter. (Oh, winter, stay away). 

Then my father-in-law visits and says that I need to get my husband (his son) to fix something that is wrong with our front door. When I tell my husband he says, "How on earth do you fix that?" I shrug. I have no idea either. 

So just what are things we should own, given our areas of expertise?

Him?: Any and all camping / hiking equipment. Funny how he can take all that apart and put it back together. He also does OK with his bike and his trombone. He wants an electric piano just because it won't need tuning. 

For me: a pencil. I get a notebook, too. Maybe.

Other than that, we're pretty inept. 

Stephen King

I've not read a lot of Stephen King's books. They're not really my type of reading. But I have found lots of inspiration from his book "On Writing: a memoir of the craft". I try and read this book every couple of years. There's always something good I missed the time before. I do, however, love the back jacket and always have:

  "For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room. . . In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study in the rear of the house. For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind. . . 

A year or two later after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living-room suite where it had been. . . In the early nineties, before they moved on to their own lives, my kids sometimes came up in the evening to watch a basketball game or a movie and eat pizza. . . I got another desk--it's handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave. . . I'm sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangovers. I'm doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about . . . and now I'm going to tell you as much as I can about the job. . . . 

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around."

Lemonade Stand

There was only a single day in my childhood that I had a lemonade stand. My brother and I had thought it was a great idea. No one dissuaded us. Our Mom probably loved that we were out of her hair for almost the entire day. All it cost her was a single pitcher of lemonade. 

We drug the card table out on the lawn and set our two folding chairs around it. We had cups, and ice, and a hand-made sign drawn with markers on poster board. It was hot. Very hot. We were going to be rich. 

Our older sister was not interested in our business venture. She was old enough to know what we didn't. Well, maybe we knew, but we didn't want to admit it. Instead, we hoped that our proximity to the reservoir, a local boating and fishing hotspot would provide us with customers. The problem was, our house was about 3 miles further up the road than the loading dock and a full mile past where the reservoir ended.

As far as locations go, ours was not ideal. We sold lemonade 8.3 miles from the center of our small town, along a windy country road that (in those days) seldom saw traffic. After my brother and I exchanged quarters, we each took a glass of lemonade. We watched the cars: there were three of them that went by that entire day. Not one stopped. 

Still, we watched the road with hopefulness, swishing our bare feet just above the clipped grass. We sold (or failed to sell) lemonade for most of the day. It was a failed endeavor from the start, but I loved that no one told us we couldn't try.