At the beginning and the end of all the grief of loss of someone we love, whether to death or to Alzheimer’s, is a need to figure out how to go on living for those of us left behind.
First to rage.
Next to pray.
Then to forgive.
Finally to turn the earth for a garden.
Just a Thought 14
Memory of the Garden at Etten by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.org
As long as one person still lives, this moment can’t be all there is to life. As companion to God, one person can repair the world, one person can save the world, one person can create the world, and one person can guarantee the future. Understand – I am the one person on whom God depends. So are You.
Just a Thought 13
Image Earth from space courtesy: NASA
My commentary is narrowed by my amateur position. Don’t listen to anything I say or read anything I write. Unless you want to.
Now is my time to write the story that can no longer be bound to my list of promises. Something to make you open your heart. Only a person who lifts his palm can accept and can give, one being the same as the other. I need your help. I need you to believe in me enough to read my words. I need you to believe in me that I may write something worthy.
This much I know: I did not get here alone and will not leave without a friend by my side. Your attention elevates me to professional status.
Ah, here you are.
Thank you, dear friend. Let us get to work.
And so I rise.
Just a thought 12
Hikers image courtesy Pixabay.com
Surely you’ve heard the comment, “I found it on the Internet.” You can write an entire book just by finding information on the web, trolling around Google Earth to discover how a location looks, and verifying historical references on Wikipedia. Search through a thousand images to describe the scene of your dreams or nightmares. Birth intriguing characters, devise a dilemma, pop in several crises, add a few red herrings, and construct a conclusion. Write it all out in your own words.
Spend three months or a year hanging out in Starbucks sipping your favorite wrappa-frapppa-chappa frothed with whipped cream while plugging away on a laptop, compiling your ideas and notes into a story. Your story. My story.
Title your work, apply for an ISBN, self-publish or aim for traditional publication, and you’ve got yourself a book. Maybe not a great piece of literature, but a story of sorts. Flash fiction, a six-word story, a screenplay, novel, or memoir. Perhaps a prospect for a serial looms, each title relating similar hi-jinks and low brow appeal with a quirky but likable protagonist at the helm and a nasty antagonist in the underbelly.
Everybody can try. Anybody can be a writer. Even you. Even me.
My newest WIP is loosely based on my grandparents’ and parents’ lives early in the twentieth century. Of course I didn’t know my parents when they were kids, and the stories they told are bereft of the details I want to include. I find myself checking the Internet for the facts I need.
It isn’t that I’m too lazy to go look it up in a library among the stacks of real books. It’s that the library of today is a media conference room, a cultural gathering site, and rent free micro-business office space. Latch key kids work on homework while waiting for parents. The homeless find it a safe place to doze while appearing engrossed in pamphlets left by various local businesses. The unemployed bring their dismay with them as they search job opportunities. The elderly gather to read magazines and newspapers. The lonely come to socialize.
Books? Many of the shelves have been swept of books, creating more room for videos and CDs, space for computer stations, and sofas for lounging. So I can’t peruse the stacks in search of corroborating information for whatever premise I’ve imagined – the books aren’t there. I might as well stay home. It’s Internet browsing for me as well.
Ah, computer research. There I’ve located my childhood homes – seven of them, all posing for their photos, a few looking dated and worn, a few graciously maintained and attractively remodeled. One in Philly, one in Hawaii, three in New Jersey, two in California. I discovered that Trenton and much of New Jersey were very much the center of the Revolutionary War. I grew up mere miles from the places whose history made me American instead of British. How I wish as a kid I’d been so impressed when studying the war that birthed our nation. Should have been more attentive to being in the actual locales of history. Unknown heroes and unfamiliar sites reveal their mysteries in online educational sites, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and thesauri. (Yep, that’s the correct plural – I looked it up on the Internet.
Several books related to my subject are suggested so I consider whether to pursue them. I dare not read a book without first scanning reviews on Goodreads and Kirkus to assure I’m not wasting time on a tome I won’t like, and reading the reviews takes time. Some reviews are so interesting I must investigate others written by same person. I get up to heat water for tea and remember the microwave is broken and not repairable.
So, next I’m shopping on line. When buying appliances, I always examine the safety, efficiency, and value ratings before handing over my credit card, all of which I can do over the Internet and never have to enter a store. The entire world lies before me on the screen, seducing me away from everything else I need to do. Away from writing. Ah, but it’s all so interesting.
Fact is, I can find out nearly everything on the Internet, but I must write my own book. There are no new stories, only new iterations of old ones, and only a limited number of themes to explore. The fresh approach must be mine. Time to close the browser with all its attractive and tempting images, jingles, pop ups, cat videos, on-line personality quizzes, Facebook friends, links to sensational news stories, cooking and travel blogs, and Groupon deals, and hie myself to my story files on my computer. I went looking for a few facts to put in my book and became distracted with a million (fascinating) excuses not to write.
But I am a writer. I should be dipping a quill into ink, scratching a pencil in a journal, typing on my old manual Olivetti. Armed with ideas and information, my story is waiting to be told, and only diligent application of words will result in its completion. So now I write.
New document page please.
Wait – where’s my coffee cup? For crying out loud, how can I write without my coffee?
Photo of coffee cup and computer courtesy Pixabay.com
The anticipation of going to sleep is the hope of waking in the morning with all the promise of something wonderful arriving with the dawn.
The comfort of sleep is knowing I’ve used the hours of light well.
Just a Thought 11
Dawn image courtesy: Pixabay.com
Ask Siri how to get where you’re going, and she’ll tell you, “In two hundred feet, turn left at Market Street.” When you miss that turn, she’ll adjust her directions, unperturbed by your error. “In a quarter mile, turn left at Waverly Avenue.” One way or another, Siri’s GPS master will guide you home.
But I miss maps. I miss all those Thomas Guides, coming out each year with new additions marking the way to new destinations. I miss wandering various routes to get someplace, knowing the adventure was in the travel along back roads and new tracts, not the destination. If I got lost, I’d just pull out Thomas and find two or three options out of my quandary.
Lucky for me because I have no intuitive sense of direction. Just think how many times I’ve ended up on the back deck staring at the eucalyptus trees swaying in the wind when I was on my way to the laundry room. Who wants to sort white clothes from colors when I could be finding the perfectly colored autumn leaf, studying the bark peeling like blisters from the trunk, or watching ants march along the trail their queen has commanded?
Siri would tell me, “Turn around at the patio door and enter the living room. Proceed directly to the garage and park at the washing machine. Sort clothes.” My impulse is to grab the map and look for forests nearby. What trees grow there? I must explore. Laundry can wait.
People no longer have a sense of where they are in the world. Turning right or left in hundreds of feet gives no idea of placement. We don’t realize we’re only a few miles from the ocean, or around the corner from the favorite playground where we played as kids. Thomas Guides would tell us when we examined its pages, but Siri never makes the connection so neither do we.
I find similar displacement when looking up words on the online thesaurus instead of browsing the 1248 pages of The Original Roget’s International Thesaurus, 6th Edition.
Take the word “belief.” Its designation in Roget is number 953, and there are twenty categories displaying hundreds of entries from nouns to verbs to adverbs. The word “philosophy” is similarly described in number 952, and 954 is the word “credulity.” Peruse the thousands of words and you grasp relationships far beyond believing in anything. You begin to believe in everything as a possibility. Some of the things I learned were the relationship of belief to opinion, esteem, faith, trust, understanding, credibility, swallow, certainty, conviction, persuasion, dogma, confession, gullibility, ingenuous, viewpoint, notion, estimation, and idealism. All that education and much more in five pages. The broad spectrum of language doesn’t display as much diversity or breadth of interpretation on the Internet, not without a lot of clicking and toggling.
Luddite that I am, don’t despair. I’m on the Internet plenty, looking up photographs of macaws which leads to exploring the rainforests of Peru, then discovering that macaws are zygodactyl. Nope, not gonna tell you – look it up. And in case you want to know how much of a Luddite I really am, consider that I used to design patterns for fabric, eventually to be printed in yards and yards of cotton that became board shorts, bikinis, and Hawaiian shirts, by drawing and painting them with Luma dyes on masa paper. Luma dyes are long discontinued, sadly, but masa paper is still available. Except for my turquoise-faced self portrait, a three-minute sketch made about ten years ago, I’ve never designed art on the computer. I love the slick sensation of real paint on my hands and the stain of color under my fingernails lasting through several showers. Who wouldn’t love to dress up in sequins and heels with teal colored streaks on their hands? I’ve attended more than one wedding so uniquely decorated.
We will not discuss texting. I refuse to read them, I can’t write them. I have a flip phone but not a smart one, and texting is an exercise in self control on the device. My default strategy is the smash the cell phone against a wall when trying to text, so I don’t. Want to talk to me? Do it the old fashioned way – run into me in the mall, or call me on the landline, or even send me an email. Texting is for the birds, hyper-texting is for Twitter, and surely you realize I’ve never had anything to do with Twitter. My birds were all real, beautiful cockatiels who played with my sons when they were little.
I’ve learned just enough digi-techie stuff to get by in the modern world but not enough to be useful to anyone but me. To prove my point: we finally donated our nineteen-year-old car to the high school auto shop program. As of a month ago, I’m driving a much safer 2015 RAV 4 and have learned how to start the car without a key. Without a key, I tell you! But I haven’t programmed Siri, or whoever likes to give driving directions, into the car. So I still need a map. At least, I look up where I want to go on Map Quest. But only because they no longer update the Thomas Guides.
Funny the things you miss as you grow older.
Image courtesy of The Original Roget’s International Thesaurus, 6th Edition, copyright Barbara Ann Kipfer, Ph.D., 2001, Harper Collins.
Image of The Geographer by Johannes Vermeer. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less – published anywhere before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.
Give me a kiss.
I will write one more word.
Laugh and I will write a page.
Sob, I will complete the story.
Just a Thought 10
The Kiss (Lovers) painting, 1907, 1908, by Gustav Klimt courtesy: en.wikipedia.org
The kitchen is the heart of the home. This much I know.
There is story in the colander and the strawberry essence and the music. How will I gather it?
Something elemental prevails in the water. Ah, now I write.
Just a Thought 9
While My Guitar Gently Weeps lyrics by George Harrison, 1968
Water Drop photograph courtesy David Restivo, Arau, Switzerland; commons.wikimedia.org
Sharon Lynne Bonin-Pratt began her writing career the way so many others have done: by first doing everything else. Winning entries in grade school art, story, and essay contests convinced her to become a writer, but the real world intruded in adulthood and demanded she pay bills, raise kids, be a contributing member of the community. Along that rutted path she worked in the commercial art field designing patterns for surfer shorts, bikinis, and Hawaiian style shirts, taught after-school art through a city recreation program, and structured an art curriculum for three private schools. Ten years ago the writing muse, struggling to breathe in letters to friends and art articles, found its way to the surface. In a two-week period Shari wrote 60 pages of her first historical novel, and didn’t stop for three years. By then a second book demanded paper – OK, computer space – and now the third is in final revision stage. Of course, final revision is two words with a long shadow and a little footprint. Some folk claim they will write when the floors get vacuumed, the family accounting completed, the new garden planted. Shari is proof that all those things can be successfully ignored but not the urge to write. Her fiction explores human relationships, revenge, rage, forgiveness, redemption, and all the labyrinthine quandaries that mess up otherwise perfect lives. She resides in Southern California with her husband who’s learned to vacuum but not to cook. And the garden needs help.
Sharon Bonin-Pratt's Ink Flare 