All I Need is this Stapler…

No Telling

I guess it’s just that time of year, but I’ve got a serious craving for office and school supplies. I want fancy pens and odd paperclips and fresh piles of yellow legal pads, college-ruled.

There’s absolutely nothing I actually need besides a few Parker gel refills (perfection), but that’s not put a dent in my irrational hankering for a little something more. It doesn’t help that a new Staples store opened up here not long ago, either. I can hear the notebook-and-journal sirens’ song clean through the walls of this house.

And that’s just the new stuff. I’m an avid gatherer of all things vintage. Ebay has become a curse and a blessing, because where else are you going to find those old pop-up phone indexes and boxes of air mail stationery? I’ve hunted like a fiend and it appears everyone in Arkansas is either still using them or threw them away when Nixon left office. Someone has to literally die and have their secret office drawers up for inspection at estate sales around here, which is too morbid and sad even for an addict like me.

I want an two-toned Swingline stapler, but not enough to dig through the used casserole dishes of some lovely woman who’s just gone to her Great Reward. That’s just wrong.

So tomorrow I’m heading out and won’t come back until I have a clipboard, post-it notes, onionskin paper – something – in hand. A cursory look around tells me I’m a little low on snazzy designer file folders and that won’t do.

I. Must. Replenish.

Robotic First Days of School, and a Gift

Fresh Ribbon

8-23-09
Everyday Correspondence

On a side note, I’ve spent a good portion of the weekend with The Perfect Grandson, who suffers from a cold that is only made better by watching Wall-E over and over again. If you’ve never seen it, go rent this one immediately. Saving the planet through robot love. Delightful.

(This typecast is brought to you on Sister Agnes of the Curlicue Script, a 1958 Tower President.)

A Room of One’s Own

No Telling

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
~ Virginia Woolf

This has always been one of my favorite quotes. Not because it’s true, mind you, but because it’s amusing. If it were really true, there would be four, maybe five women in the whole world who had the ingredients necessary to write even flash fiction. Forget writing a novel.

I know a lot of women who write and they work the whole business piecemeal – half an hour here, fifteen minutes there, maybe an hour after the kids go to bed and if they don’t fall asleep on their keyboards before page three. Most of us sneak writing in between loads of laundry and incessant interruptions about Where Things Are. We are the keepers, we gals, and that always manages to come first because the guilt our mothers taught us stuck. Hard.

A room of one’s own? Unless she’s got one of those creepy “safe rooms” that locks hydraulically and requires a secret code to enter, she’ll never find a room no one else feels free to enter. And it doesn’t even matter if she’s got one of those, because no amount of expensive sound-proofing will drown out the pleading on the other side of the wall.

Here’s the thing: I’m not complaining. I generally love interruptions because they mean my house is full of life and love. It’s impossible to get deeply into a story that way, so I schedule my heavy-duty writing time in the early mornings for that very reason. You wouldn’t believe how much I can write in an hour and a half of complete quiet. The rest of the day belongs to other things and plenty of them.

It’s not the room, you see, it’s the silence.

The money thing is shiftier. Sure, I can imagine having enough money to buy time away from work. I think about this often when passing through states with lottery tickets for sale at gas stations (by the way, we’re beginning a state lottery here soon and I’m VERY excited). I’m not much of a math person, but I can wrap my head around the astronomical odds of winning such a thing as enough money to write fiction. It’s fun to think about, but it’s not going to happen. I’m guessing Virginia needed less money back then.

My theory about women and piecemeal writing is that we’ve all found something that fits our interruptible lives – blogging. Short pieces and instant publishing gratification between dentist appointments and fighting children…no wonder the blogosphere is awash in mommy blogs.

And I say, attagirl.

Maybe all of us aren’t producing Woolf-level fiction, but we get the writing done with a sense of accomplishment and a saucy pop when we hit “publish.” Nothing wrong with that. For heavy-lifting fiction there are always stolen hours late and early. I don’t know about you, but I’m not missing a hug from The Perfect Grandson just to get my head more deeply into a plot. The plot will wait for silent hours, but the boy will be a man in an instant and give his hugging to someone else.

(Note: During the process of writing this post I made two pitchers of iced tea, took one phone call, found a lost book, switched out the laundry, and comforted my daughter. Just so you know.)

First Day of School

No Telling

Tomorrow is the first day of school for everyone in the No Telling household. I’ll meet my nervous freshman comp students for the first time and Em will be all over the same campus taking this and that as she feverishly works at getting that degree under her skinny belt.

Nothing new there.

What’s new is that tomorrow morning The Perfect Grandson will attend his very first day of daycare/preschool. He’s two years old, a charming rascal beloved by all, and has never been taken care of by anyone outside of our close family. Oh my.

You mamas out there know exactly what I’m talking about. Em’s already worked herself up into a pre-first-day state where she envisions the worst – choking hazards, split lips, crying jags – the whole shebang. Why, she’s even thrown herself past the immediate and well into the future. Soon, Mom, he’s going to be in kindergarten, and then high school and then some wench [sic] will take him away from me forever.

And she’s right. That’s exactly what will happen, but not tomorrow. My experienced motherhood tells me that she’ll drop him off in the morning and cry much harder than he will, because kids are funny like that. When class is over she’ll fly to the daycare to hug him more tightly than he’ll want or allow. He’ll show her around, punch his new friends affectionately, come home with a few new words and nasty habits.

That’s how it works. There are women all over the world dropping their womb-babies off with strangers for the first time. All that common umbilical cutting doesn’t make it less excruciating for a first time mama. It doesn’t get any better, I suspect, with the second or the third.

I will not be a part of the dropping off and picking up tomorrow. That’s Em’s moment and she has a right to the love and pain of it. My job will be to comfort a weeping daughter, to give her a solid place to lean when the ground starts slipping underneath. It’ll be all right.

I‘ll make sure to to schedule my own moment behind a locked office door, neatly timed so I come out looking fresh for class. And for my daughter, who will never know I’m not the rock she believes me to be.

Get Out the Umbrella, it’s Going to be a Bumpy Ride

No Telling

What I like best are the five or so minutes just before the storm. You know, when the lightning hasn’t caught up to the thunder just yet and you can smell the rain coming. I took this picture with my out-of-date cell phone and even so managed to catch a little unexpected majesty. Nothing like the great beyond working itself up into a tirade just over the subdivision rooftops of forty or so aging widow-women and their little snappy dogs.

I live in a “garden home” complete with a tall brick wall snaking its way all around us, keeping us protected from – I don’t know – maybe young people with sex drives and fast cars and bigger dogs. It’s not my fault. As I’ve mentioned before, I moved here in the early building stages and was blinded by 12″ moldings and shiny marble counter tops. You would have fallen, too. Admit it.

I‘m now among the youngest living here. My daughter and grandson who live with me are the other two. This is most obvious in the mornings when we seem to be the only people in the world leaving to go somewhere. It’s also obvious when, like tonight, a storm blows up and there’s no one but me standing in the middle of the street in my house shoes, trying to catch a tornado on a cellphone.

Make no mistake, the old gals are locked up tight clicking between the Weather Channel and Fox News.

Let’s hope they weren’t watching me, because when a good dose of lightning sprung out of the north I nearly lost both the cellphone and my ability to walk by falling up my own front steps. They’ve been a little wary of me since The Obama Conversation anyway. That’s okay. I know better than to shout “Medicare!” in a crowded garden home subdivision. I can handle these gals.

I’m going back out there. I don’t care if they’re watching or not.

The Age of Aquarius and Mimeographed Worksheets

No Telling
(Scribbling Paradisio by Dore’, with a little help from me.)

I taught at a traveling writing workshop this summer down in Harmony Grove, Arkansas. School teachers, tired ones, met with us in that sweet but woebegone way public teachers do at the end of the school year. This is when they love their students the most but are cheerfully able to say good-bye for the summer. The workshop was splendid, and you can read about it here and here.

We used a book I’ve had in the workshop arsenal for a few years called The 9 Rights of Every Writer: A Guide for Teachers. It’s geared towards educators, but it’s a fine fist-in-the-air book about what every writer needs/deserves. These are breathtakingly simple. Every writer has the right to:

  • reflect
  • finding personally important topics
  • go off topic
  • personalize the writing process
  • write badly to unearth and clarify meaning
  • observe other writers at work
  • assess constructively – and well
  • experience structural freedom
  • unearth the power of each writer’s voice.

This is a powerful book for teachers. You see, most of them are scared to death of students’ writing because many teachers don’t see themselves as writers. That’s an important hurdle during the workshops.

As an opening scribbling prompt, my partner-in-workshop-crime Stephanie asked all the teachers to pick one of the rights they wish they’d had as students. Good opener. We all began writing. Kind of.

My pen hovered over the page for a bit. It had been a few years (coughcough) since I was a public school student. I tried to summon up something, some writing experience gone awry or pinch-nosed schoolmarm with a bleeding red pen. Nothing.

The thing is, I was a public school kid in the Age of Aquarius and Mimeographed Worksheets. With the exception of one senior-year research paper, all I did was fill out purple-inked (you know you can smell them) grammar and punctuation mimeos. They were like a puzzle, really. All you had to do was figure out the pattern.

In public school, no one ever tried to teach me how to write. Huh.

But the writing happened anyway. I began as Harriet the Spy and became the girl with the contraband poetry books in her locker and a Secret Notebook in her purse. I wrote incessantly, mostly terrible poetry then published in the high school literary magazine, but would never have devalued my late ’70s coolness-mystique (good lord) by being on staff. My plan was to be Gloria Steinem and Sylvia Plath. Simultaneously.

That morning in Harmony Grove I ended up writing about the freedom students need to scribble outside of standardized testing and five-paragraph nightmares. I wrote about the freedom to be left alone with the words, to develop fearlessness and a casual attitude because everything we write isn’t stark reflection of our worth. It’s practice. It’s play. It’s necessary.

They’re just words. We can always make more.

So go write something.

Note on the Fridge to the Retail Giants… (you know who you are)

No Telling

Dear Retail Mucky-Mucks,

While other parts of the country religiously begin school just after Labor Day, around here the powers that be want school to start this week. You know, when it’s a nice and sultry 100+ degrees and the humidity makes the air palpable. It’s like breathing hot jello.

I’m trying very hard to remember what it was like as a school child in all those unairconditioned 1960’s classrooms. I know one whole wall was nothing but crank-windows and they were mostly open, but that’s because I recall fighting off errant wasps instead of the heat. Is this truly a sign of global warming, or was I too worried about playing on the monkeybars to care?

Regardless, I was reading a post about the horrors of back-to-school clothes shopping at Crazy Texas Mommy (I love her) and she brought up the tricky business of out-of-season shopping. She’s right, your stores are filled with sweaters and long pants and all manner of Fall bits, but Fall won’t happen around here until late October. Maybe not even then.

So what happened to all those summer clothes? They went on half-of-half sometime in late June. They’re gone, baby, and you’re not reordering. The Recession ate our school clothes.

It’s a double whammy. Somewhere all you retail CEOs are sitting around in turtlenecks and throwing back hot toddies. I’m guessing you’re enjoying mid-August somewhere in the Berkshires where folks have four distinct seasons. Down here, we can only dream and sling sweat.

In ragged old Summer clothes, no less.

Sincerely,

Monda

Setting up a Tent at the Retro-Tech Revival

Fresh Ribbon


Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we have a convert. Abby’s a fresh college graduate and an extraordinary writer who edited our literary magazine last year. The pink GoLightly was a gift from me and a sterling example of Writertypes’ fine mechanical voodoo.

I don’t know another soul on the planet who would change out type bars to cursive and paint an old Sears Forecaster just the right shade of ballet slipper pink. What a man.

Abby says,

I swear, it was meant to be. I typed away until I was out of ideas, which is something that hasn’t happened for me in a very long time. Something about the medium of a typewriter makes words feel so deliberate and special, without backspace, every sentence and thought is, am I meant to say that or maybe I needed to say that.

Shake the tambourines, brothers and sisters.