scribbling

Storm Chasing

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I knew it would happen. I wrote tornado stories for four days and I conjured one. Maybe more. Dammit.

We’re used to tornado watches around here, so that’s not much of a scare. I generally don’t grab my purse until the sirens actually go off, and only because I have my daughter and grandson here. If I were alone, you can bet I’d be out on the porch right now watching for funnel clouds between lightning flashes. My daughter – normally a rock – tends to get a little anxious about my standing outside during tornado weather. She’s never quite shared my fascination.

Maybe in twent-um, thirty years when I reach retirement age, instead of volunteering at the hospital or making people crazy by driving 15 miles per hour down Donaghey Street, maybe I’ll become a storm chaser. Imagine! I could load up the Avalon with a thermos of iced tea, my makeup bag, and some binoculars. Off I’d go. I could take pictures of the twisters on my cell phone and send them off instantly to CNN, because I figure in thirty years I may actually know how to work a damn cell phone. The Perfect Grandson and all his friends would mention me in hushed, reverent tones imagining me to be the coolest Grammie alive.

“Let’s go over to Levi’s house and watch his Grammie chase tornadoes on CNN!”

You have to agree that beats the hell out of greeting pre-surgery patients in the hospital lobby. Wearing a smock, no less.

Enough daydreaming. Since it looks like I’m going to be up half the night waiting for watches and warnings to pass, I might as well get to work on the tornado stories. Besides, I left Chesaleen clinging frantically to the underside of a horsehair divan, and I suspect someone needs to come extricate her.

The pearls what were her eyes

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Who doesn’t know the brevity of a sparkling thing?
The dustmotes at the window turn stained-glass cracklings
and we breathe them, unfiltered. No apologies.
Who has time to put the post-apocalyptical spin on fleeting prettiness?

Tattoo the Brazilian runway girls with their BMIs,
deny the sylphs access to the dream.
A woman is a thirsty opal glaring from an igneous fist,
an uncut stone, a fallow shard of sea-glass accidental lightning-skip,
a novelty.

The stubby cacti growing misplaced on Petit Jean Mountain are women.
There are warning signs:
Don’t pick native wildflowers.
Wear hard shoes against their low, unexpected prickle.

The mountain is a little woman and the story of a dying woman,
and a ledge women throw their hearts from.
Sometimes the rest follows.
Sometimes in the morning papers there are
stories of wildflower women illegally picked and
left like breadcrumbs on the Seven Hollows Trail for sleepy bears.

Don’t get lost.

(Still working on this one. I think I’m watching too much CNN.)

I whined, but I wrote

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The two suitors offering to light my cigarette are Frustration and Distraction. You know those boys, and they’re not gentlemen at all. It’s bad enough when one of them comes calling, but I’m being double-teamed.

My personal, sacred scribbling time suffers, and it makes me difficult. Frustration and Distraction are wild-eyed bad-boys and they’ve both simply got to shoo.

I used to have this delightful hour every day when I sat outside – rain, shine, or tornado – and did a little hand-scribbling in a chemistry notebook. I’m one of those fidgety extroverts who can’t write in a closed room alone, so I always wrote outside the student center or at the local coffee shop. Just enough solitude, just enough background murmur, and the perfection of a good notebook.

It wasn’t that I was stoically productive or especially brilliant at those times, that wasn’t really the point. It was a languid, trusted hour without rules and “no smoking within 25 feet of door” signs. It was my hand gripping a perfect pen and gliding over the page with so much to say, to cram into that little hour. It was bad coffee and too many Virginia Slims in places where I never had to create a character because they were sitting all around me. Makes me a little misty just thinking about it.

I’m going to whine now, so pay close attention.

The problem began with the outdoor smoking ban at the coffee shop and student center renovations that cordoned off my Very Perfect Place To Write. These two events happened concurrently, leaving me no choice but to write in my office or at home. Both places lack ever-changing crowds and weather. Both places have a computer, and I suspect the computer is killing me. I really do.

In the time it took to write this far I already checked Ebay, my office email, my personal email, my students’ group blog, the weather for tomorrow, and CNN for the latest on the Michigan primary. Hillary won a one-man (person) race and Huckabee finished third. I’m serious. You know I am because you do this, too.

Frustration and Distraction. There they are. It’s enough to age me beyond my 36 years (thanks for the suggestion, Tim).

I’ve decided that the computer also makes me rewrite as I’m creating – something that doesn’t happen when I’m handwriting. It also makes me all parenthetical and dashy – a terrible, computer-invoked symptom reflecting an inability to concentrate for more than, say, three running seconds. Multitasking is good if you’re trying to clean the house or get ahead at your factory job, but it’s literary murder for those of us who need to write for extended periods just to feel balance.

I ran across a blog the other day that blew me away – Strikethru. Typecasting or papercasting is so delightful that I won’t attempt explanation. I’ll just show you. And then I’ll check my mail and Ebay and go to bed. You really should stop by this site.

Miss Dolly

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I did not bring a casserole. Unable to concoct to exacting specification the ooze and string of cheese gluing warm egg noodles to bits of ham, bell pepper, I chose instead to come to her empty handed. Two days earlier, catching shallow life through a mask she told me about casseroles. Don’t ever make a good one, she steamed into the plastic, it will be the only thing they remember of you.

I took her walk. I stepped her route, wanting my feet to roll and plant precisely as hers did each afternoon. I memorized each uprooted sidewalk slab, noting the angle, the lift of the foot required to navigate, where to slow, to speed, noting fragment odors she used to find her way. She began and ended here where the ginkgo drops its slippery yellows and, later, the rocky seeds that smell like five-day garbage when crushed. Half blind, she ached for strong odors.

Who was it pinched the stray hairs tight into final finger waves? Would she have cared? So many times I saw her bent hard at the middle toward some too-thick patch of irises, pausing only to remove a paperclip from an apron pocket, stuffing clip and dirt and sweat into that hair. The object was not hair, but irises. She only wanted a clearer field of vision.

Dolly liked order, but only as neatly as she could control it in the yard and kitchen. She had an eye for symmetry, pruning her life and privet hedges closely. Personally, she was discreetly unkempt, as old women with faulty eyes become when they can no longer fasten their own pearls on Sunday morning. She did her best work outside, guarding always between those flattened breasts a rag, reached for delicately, used to wipe neck sweat– or child sweat, if a loose neighbor child wandered into the yard. The small and curious and were soon put to work, paid each time with one unsquandered nickel. Those empty breasts never suckled anything except one husband, Baptist, 36 years dead. He was a man who knew how to wear a hat, she said, but still a man.

The afternoon he was put to ground they said she gave away all his suits to the young music teacher who lived alone and sang unchristian arias like a woman. Afterwards Dolly ambled – then more briskly, steadily – the two miles to the Plymouth dealership. Still dressed in unchanged mourning, graveside dust settled into the woolen bend of her arm, she told the owner, Teach me how to drive. Two hours later she placed a roll of old bills in the man’s upturned hands and eased the black-finned Plymouth home, headlights off in the dark. The following morning she became a Methodist and never went to church again.

Dolly left an expanse of small things old women leave behind. Chipped china of irreplaceable pattern, forgotten blankets, a hundred clear Kerr jars lined up like armageddon on failing pantry shelves, a pale blue initialed vanity case, locked forever and certainly never used which bounced against my leg as I opened the gate from her backyard to mine.

Back home, I found a straw hat to guard against freckles. I slipped out behind the mourners to weed her dill and took note of the crabapples beginning to fall like rose-star bombs ready for the steam and smash of the jelly pot, stretched a newspaper rubber band from my wrist and knotted my hair behind me careless as Saturday morning. When I fell to my knees, it was for work.

(I’ve been pulling out old first-draft pieces to mess with, and this is one rough one. It’s all over the place. I’ll pull it to the forefront for a bit and see if I can’t make it do what I want it to do.)

Resolutions, the Jetsons, and the Marlboro Man

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Weren’t we all supposed to be flying our cars around multilevel air highways like the Jetsons by now? And what about those space-needle apartments with robot maids? It’s 2008 and I’m still making my own coffee.

Never mind. It’s time to make resolutions I won’t keep.

Number 1: Go to the gym every day for three hours until I have abs like that gal on The Firm video.

Number 2: Finish every novel I’ve ever started and publish them all. Wear sunglasses to Kroger to escape adoring public.

Number 3: Serve champagne to the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes Prize Patrol when they come calling.

Number 4: Meet Mr. Right, the poet/cowboy/handsome/no crazy ex-wives/millionaire, live happily ever after, and such.

Number 5: Clean out the garage.

Done. If I’m going to disappoint myself it’s best to go all the way.

Just don’t say "moniker." It’s pretentious.

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I’m an unapologetic name collector. Usually I find them in phonebooks, but I’ve been known to eavesdrop on conversations at Wal-Mart and a few other places, wander off an aisle or two, and quickly scribble down stolen names from snippets of conversation. Sometimes I thieve entire conversations, but that’s a story for another day.
When I travel, which isn’t terribly often, I’ve been known to snag entire phonebooks so I may, once safely home, flip hungrily through foreign books and update my list. It’s a long list, but you can bet I’ve never been stuck for a character’s name. Not once. For me, nothing makes the writing go faster. There are actors who can’t get into character until they find the right pillbox hat or slip on the perfect pair of wingtips. When I’m writing fiction, it’s the name.
There’s a lot of mojo in the perfect name. That’s why all these uptight new parents now spend an extravagance on naming services for their bouncing baby whatevers. It makes me laugh, especially since a generation or so ago people were having too many kids to even care. There was a formula: name the first boy after his dad, and all ensuing boys after various uncles or near-relations. John. Robert. William. Girls were named after grandmothers and aunts , or flowers, as long as the name wasn’t too ugly or the female relative too morally loose. My ex-father-in-law’s name is LD. No periods. It’s not short for anything nor does it represent his initials. Granny Fason just had too many damn kids and very little creativity. He has a brother named JD. You see what I mean.
Not many couples have seven or eight kids anymore unless they’re a Duggar. At least they have a whole Bible full of names to choose from. Now there’s research into meanings, hidden, obvious, and historic in a name. It has to stand out, give the child a head start in an ugly, competitive, eat-‘em-alive world. Forget the fat books full of baby names, over-pay some opportunist to name your kid Apple.
Actually, that’s good advice when naming characters – forget the baby name books. Otherwise everyone in your stories will sound like soap stars. Chance. Trace. Skye. Unless you’re actually writing soaps…or those bodice-rippers I used to read in junior high with Fabio (there’s another one) on the cover.
I like the phonebooks because those names are real and they cross several generations of naming trends. A good small-town, southern phonebook can take you to naming places you never thought possible. Twanette. Loyce. Crescentia. Eulid. Vernadean. Eightha. Thurl. And those are my throw-aways. I have hundreds of others I’d use in second. Names like Portia, Sulie, Ever, Warfield, and Rueben just write their own stories.
Some are just too unbelievable to use. For example, I went to school with a girl named Listerine Piggee, bless her heart. Another gal who sweated on the first day of school was Vagina (pronounced va-geena) Sumpter. Luckily, calling roll on the first day of school the teachers always lilted, “Miss Sumpter?” giving poor Va-geena the benefit of the pause. I’ve used this roll-calling trick myself when face-to-rollbook with an unfortunately named student. I do appreciate an unusual name, but not when it victimizes. No character – living or created – should have to answer to Listerine.