Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Reflections

Found in a small notebook that I used to carry with me when I spent time outdoors.

Everything looks pretty in reflection. Rocky bits, dirty hills, bare trees, gray clouds; they all shine in reflections. Even the plainest feature takes on a measure of elegance when reflected on water.

Even the means of reflection is ordinary on its own. Muddy water over dirty shores aren't all that beautiful. The water doesn't excel until it shows something other than itself. It's transformed into a thing of wonder when it smooths into glass and reflects the surrounding settings.

That's where the true beauty of reflections lie. Not in the individual pieces that make up the whole, but the combination of the two. Not the image, but the act.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Storytelling

A story written to make a friend smile a couple of years ago.

When the sun sets and all the family gathers round the fire, I tell the story of a man long gone. A man who still inspires me to this day.

A man....who ran the street sweeper.

"Listen here, my children." I say, gathering young Susie and little Peter onto my lap. "Listen and I'll share with you a bit of our history. I'll tell you the tale of..."

"Street Sweeper Joe!" Susie yells and claps her hands in glee.

"Seet sep 'oe!" Peter echoes drunkenly. His mother insists that he speaks that way because he's two, but I swear that I can smell the telltale whiff of whiskey when he comes near. Poor little fellow.

"Peter, you need to lay off the sauce." I admonish halfheartedly before continuing. "The story of Street Sweeper Joe is a good story, an old story, a story that must be passed on. Now let me think of how to start it."

"Many, many years ago...

The Earth had advanced to a point when little needed to be done to sustain everyday life. The necessities were taken care of and the populace went about carefree and happy.

The people rejoiced. The leaders played a lot of golf. The small woodland animals danced.

Eventually a life of leisure for everyone led to some problems. Mainly with upkeep. Everyone had forgotten how to take care of things and soon they had a problem. There was a scourge upon the land and the name of that scourge was trash. It was piled up on street corners, it was overflowing out of garbage cans, it was fluttering about in the afternoon breeze like a very poetic thing.

But it was not poetic. It was stinky. It was dirty. It was probably very unhygienic.

The people complained. The leaders fretted. The small woodland animals headed upwind.

It got so bad that one day the very last piece of grass was taken over by trash. As far as the eye could see there were piles and mounds of garbage. Everyone walked around with their noses plugged and their eyes watering and their shoes getting soggy with things they would rather not think about."

"Ewwww!" Giggled Susie.

"Mrpp" Peter drunkenly mumbled.

"Really, your mother should take away your whiskey. It's unseemly for a boy your age. Now, where was I?"

"It had gotten bad enough that the population of Earth decided to start picking up their trash. They went out in groups and gathered and shoveled and pushed and poked. But no matter how much effort they put into it, they didn't accomplish anything. They had no trash-picking skills, nowhere to put the trash and they kept getting distracted by having to swoon dramatically over the smell. Honestly, so much dramatic swooning was going on day and night that there was barely time to notice that they weren't accomplishing anything with the trash problem.

The people swooned. The leaders drank. The small woodland animals laughed at the swooning and the drinking and the drunken swooning.

Then one morning, a rumbling sound could be heard across the land. The people stopped their swooning and climbed up out of the trash. Reveled in the rays of the rising sun there stood...."

"Street Sweeper Joe!" Susie and Peter yelled. Or rather Susie yelled and Peter waved his hands wildly and burped.

"Yes, my darlings. It was Street Sweeper Joe, riding into town on his street sweeper of salvation. As he rumbled up and down the streets and highways, the trash was slowly removed. Once again the sidewalks, the pavements, even the grass was exposed to the sun again. The people came out and danced on the now-clean earth. They sang out a song extolling Street Sweeper Joe's virtues. They threw flowers, only to have Joe sweep them up quickly.

The people rejoiced. The leaders gave thanks. The small woodland animals hid from the big rumbling machine.

Finally the job was done, the trash was gone and Street Sweeper Joe pulled up in front of the capital and looked down at all the people. The leader walked up and said to Joe, 'You have saved us, you street sweeper hero! What can we do to repay you?' But Joe was a humble sort and he spoke, his voice as rumbly as the street sweeper he drove...

'Joe is name
Street sweeping is my game
I want nothing more
Than to do my little chore
No gold, rubies or cash
Just let me sweep up your trash
And I'll be happy, I say
Thank you and good day.'

The townspeople were impressed by his sentiment, even though his rhyme scheme was a little off and they gratefully agreed to let him pick up trash. Street Sweeper Joe taught the people how to keep things clean and to this day we honor when the anniversary of the day he came to town."

" 'oe still here?" Peter asked with a slur.

"No, my sweet inebriated child. One day Street Sweeper Joe started talking about recycling and compost heaps and it was decided that he was getting to be too uppity so the leaders decided to kick him out of town. But to this day, if you listen very closely in the dead of night, you might here the rumbling sound of Street Sweeper Joe."

The light fades as the fire dies down and I send the family off to bed, shaking my head at Peter's wobbling attempts to walk in a straight line. One day I'm going to figure out where that kid gets his whiskey. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow we have to go out and swoon dramatically as we try to pick up the trash that has taken over our world.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Wee Notebooks

I have an obsession with tiny notebooks. I love the wee ones that you can stuff into a pocket or slip into your purse or jam down the front of your camera case. Maybe it's because of my old desire to be a reporter, or my imagined views of famous writers bent over moleskin notebooks penning out the novels that cemented their fame.

Whatever the motivation is, I have several of these wee notebooks. I keep coming across them in old purses and backpacks, stuffed behind books on the bookshelf, hiding under a bunch of socks. They just keep popping up and enticing me with their tiny cuteness. The best thing about finding these notebooks is that I've used them for such random things.

Case in point: Tiny green notebook, found in the utensil drawer next to the spoons. Floury fingerprints on the cover would lead me to believe I had a recipe written inside, but the only food related item I could find was a messy scrawl on one page proclaiming "DON'T EAT BUTTER!"

The first half of the notebook had been used as a notepad for Balderdash, the game where a word is read aloud and then you have to make up definitions for it. There are page after page of sentences with such things as "the last car in a pileup", "sound of a pregnant hippo exhaling" and "the inability to function when wearing pants". Each page makes me laugh, either at the silliness of the definitions or the remembrance of the games in which they were played.

Doodles line the pages of the center of the notebook, a few palm trees, a hibiscus flower or two. Apparently I was in a tropical mood during the use of this notebook, as leis and dolphins and coconuts seem to take up the majority of my doodles. I can't remember the reason for that phase, although I'm assured it's more like it was easier to draw than I actually expressed a desire to visit. Anything over 80 degrees and I get twitchy.

The last bit of the notebook is my favorite. Besides the dire warning about butter, this is chock full of a story that I was writing at the time. Scribbles in half a dozen different ink and pencil colors tell the story of Will and Amos Mattingerly, a father and son who try to connect with each other as the world changes around them. The words have faded into the paper in places and it's hard to make out just where I was going with the plot, but there are bigger issues that jump out at me. Sadly, they are issues that are fairly common for me in this genre.

Will and Amos are very girly in their speech patterns. I think that I struggled with the format of it being emotional scenes between two men and ended up making them sound overly emotional and flowery. That's usually how to tend to write anyway, but most of the time I can shift that dialouge onto a female character. It makes me want to work harder at my male characters. Also, I think that this piece runs the line of being too science fiction. There's a whole paragraph that describes the 'ralyon' trees outside the house. What moon they come from, the color of their leaves and just what primates eat their fruit.

Apparently my sci fi fics are all about weeping poetic men and primate-laden moon trees. Is it any wonder that I rarely write sci fi?

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Scribble, scribble, scratch

I went through three pencils and two sheets of paper trying to write a poem tonight. I'm the first to say that anyone can write at anytime, you just have to try...but I will concede that there are writing moods.

Sometimes I will feel this overwhelming desire to write something specific. Tonight it was poetry. I was in my bedroom hanging up my laundry to dry and I just felt like writing a poem. I tried to resist, after all, there was wet laundry in my immediate field of vision. I tried to focus on hangers and hemlines and making sure that nothing was dripping on anything important. Yet my mind refused to cooperate and began to enlist my body into its evil schemes. My arms felt heavier each time I tried to lift a hanger. My body longed to lay across the bed with a notepad. Even my eyes kept diverting from laundry and searching out the stack of pencils on top of a nearby sketchbook. It was like my entire being was calling out to write this poem. Even the first line popped into my brain and out of my mouth. "Such a tiny thing am I."

That was the final nail in my coffin. I shoved the wet clothes into the basket and scrambled for the pencils, flipping to a page in the sketchbook and started writing. But after that first sentence was down...nothing seemed to work. The rest of the poem was missing. Oh, I tried to write it of course. I tried different rhyme schemes, different comparisons; I even tried singing a bit to see if it sounded better as lyrics. I couldn't find anything that worked. So I stepped away, hoping that giving it a bit of a breather would help me find the rest of the words. I still felt that pull, that urge to write and I knew that it wasn't finished yet.

I finished the laundry. I made my bed. I fussed and flitted around my bedroom trying to waste time until inspiration struck. I knew that if I went back to the page now I would just end up scribbling and scratching more broken words and never finish the poem. Finally, I could think of nothing else to do. I grabbed a fresh notebook and leaned against the edge of my bed, copying down that first sentence. "Such a tiny thing am I." As I went to set my pencil down to write something else, I realized something.

It was finished. That was everything I was supposed to write. Just that one sentence. The urge to write had left in a rush and left me looking at these six words. I have to admit, I'm confused. Is just a really short poem? Is it the beginning of something I'm not supposed to finish now? Is it a message from God? Is it just me being nutty?

Such a tiny thing am I. I'm not sure what it means, but it's something to ponder tonight.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

One of my hats


For the past month I've been frustrated with my brother's lawyer. I just haven't felt like he cares about the case and isn't trying very hard. So my brother and I set up a meeting to go in and talk. Or, as my family put it, for 'Jen to set him straight'. :)

Before the meeting, I went through all the court documents and reports with a notebook and highlighter and post-it flags. There's just something I love about marking up a page like that. It's almost as much fun as taking a red pen to a page! After taking all my notes and typing them up into a neat list that I could hand over to the lawyer and refer back to when we were talking. I have no problem with confrontation but sometimes I caught up in the moment and it's nice to have a list to pull me back on track.

So the day of the meeting I was armed with copies of my lists, notebooks and a confident attitude and the meeting went very well. Apparently the lawyer got a lot out of it as well because a week later he sent the prosecuting attorney a letter about the case and the middle part of the letter was word for word taken from the list I had given him!

It's nice to see an immediate real world benefit to my writing. Also it was nice to see my family appreciate my writing...enough to give me my own lawyer crown!

Friday, August 8, 2008

Orphan

I had a teacher in junior high who was just the right mixture of handsome and cool. All the girls had crushes on him and all the boys hung out with him. Everyone loved Mr. K. Even me. Although my fascination with Mr. K didn't manifest itself with schoolgirl crushes or fraternity-style jokes. No, I wrote a story and the teacher that everyone loved was much more sinister in the pages of my notebook.

There! Megan groaned in relief as she spied the doors at the end of the hallway. She felt like she had been running for hours, turned around in the darkened rooms and dimly lit halls of the high school. Throwing a hand out to lean against the nearest locker, she was surprised to see a red scrape across her knuckles. She had thought she had cut it when she shimmed under the gate at the library, but surprisingly it didn't hurt. She flexed her fingers for a moment and watched as a sluggish drop of blood ran down the back of her hand.

"That looks like it hurts." The soft voice came from so close behind her that Megan could feel his breath blow through her hair. She whirled, her hand flying out to push him away as she started to run.

"No. No. Nononononono." Megan chanted breathlessly as she careened down the hallway. She had come too far to let him get her now. With a burst of speed she aimed for the push bar on the door, hoping to get through before he could catch up. She ran, her aching lungs straining in her chest and with a cry she hit the doors.

And they hit back. There was a metallic rattle as she pushed against the bars and Megan looked through the window to see a chain wrapped around the handles. Thumping her head against the window, she felt a few tears escape her tightly clenched eyes. She could hear his footsteps behind her, slow and steady. As terrified as she was, she refused to keep her back to him now. Turning, she raised her chin and tried to meet his eyes.

"Oh, very good." He nodded as he stopped in front of her, his hand reaching out to tap her chin with one finger. "This bravery is almost believable."

Megan flinched and tried to clear her throat before speaking. "W-w-what are you going to do to me?"

"That would spoil the surprise. But I promise it'll be fun." He leaned in, his breath tickling her ear as his hands tightened on his shoulders. "I wouldn't lie to you, would I?"

With an almost silent whimper, Megan closed her eyes as he pulled into the nearest classroom.

That's actually it. It isn't part of a larger story at all. Just that one orphan scene. I've always wanted to write more of it, figure out just what Mr. K was going to do or why Megan was running, but it never materialized. It's forever just this orphan scene inspired by Mr. K grinning and whispering "I wouldn't lie to you, would I?" when he refused to tell us anymore about a special project for the next class. Even though I really liked the teacher, it sounded so wonderfully sinister that I couldn't help jotting down the snippet that popped into my mind. It's a story that's always haunted me, unable to be expanded on or finished for well over ten years. But the story and the whispered phrase still gives me the shivers.

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

By any other name

I wonder if everyone who looks at spam sees poetry lurking between the ads and vulgarity or if it's something that my eyes alone seek out. Today's little spambox gem is poetic enough that even the untrained eye can appreciate its beauty.

Subject: canvasback ramrod goodbye

intensive leatherback except? lauren, nazism leatherback.
destiny portrait exploitation prospectus attitude raucous, venomous
moll venomous meal leatherback venomous.

canvasback xylem canvasback

albanian sandy paris? raucous, albanian eduardo.
intensive remit romeo calcareous frau sandy, seat
nebraska parse prospectus tamarind parse.

prospectus adenosine sandy

intensive remit inequitable? ramrod, eduardo profligate.

wastrel lauren.