Free Write Friday: The Three Little Pigs

There was a time when I was a little kid that I had a terrible fear of something bad happening to my house.  A hurricane would come and blow us all away.  A flood would carry the house out to sea.  There would be an earthquake, and the house would fall into whatever dark abyss was down there in the huge crack that would appear, taking us all with it.  There would be a tremendous avalanche and the house would be gone forever (or at least until Spring) covered in tons of snow.  A fire would come and consume the house, burning us and all our stuff in a gigantic ball of flame.

This fear was right up there with my fear of the Thing that lived under my bed.  I thought I might be able to avoid the Thing by lying very quietly right in the middle of the mattress, because if I were still enough, he wouldn’t know I was there.  Besides, his arms weren’t long enough to reach me if I were dead center.  But I could think of no remedies to the house disaster I knew was coming.  The only thing I could come up with was to live in a brick house.  Of course, my opinions about architecture didn’t carry much weight with my parents, who were just fine with the wood frame house we called home.  I knew in my heart that they were being terribly short-sighted, but there was little I could do about it.  I could only hope that I would survive their naiveté until I was old enough to have my own house, which would, of course, be brick. 

This fear was worse at night, because everybody knows that bad stuff always happens when you aren’t paying attention and least expect it.  I knew we would all be sleeping soundly in our beds when disaster struck, helpless to fend it off and unable to escape before we met our doom.  Needless to say, my sleep was often fitful.  I was plagued by nightmares hot with flames, cold with snow, dark and deadly in the center of the earth. 

My parents were so concerned about the frequency with which I awoke terrified,  screaming, hot and sweaty (or cold and shivering, depending), and crying hysterically, that they took me to the doctor.  His diagnosis? Growing pains. Please. I knew better. We were going to perish in our house, soon to be destroyed in some cataclysm.  Of course I was not sleeping well.  If only someone would listen.

It was a terrible period in my childhood.  And I blame the three little pigs.

Thoreau Thursday: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

In 1917, when Dad was 12 years old and in the sixth grade, his father ran away from home, leaving Dad and his mother to fend for themselves. She had never worked outside the home, and besides, there wasn’t much out there for an uneducated woman. So she did what many women of the times might have done. She took in boarders. The house was big enough, and there were plenty of immigrants leaving Ellis Island and looking for a place to live.

Dad quit school, and went to work. Apparently, there was employment to be had for an eager lad willing to work. During his teens, he had a varied career. He was a bank runner, carrying paperwork to and fro for the fledgling Chase Manhattan Bank. He worked as a switchman for the railroad. That was when he lost his two front teeth, which were knocked out by a lantern swung by the signalman during a fight. He was an apprentice to an oil burner repairman. He even played first base on a semi-professional minor league baseball team. He never made much money, but what he made was turned over to his mother to help.

Dad never forgave his father. Long after Dad was an adult, my grandfather got in touch with him, hoping for a reconciliation with his only child. Dad refused to have anything to do with him. My grandmother had died young, an exhausted woman, and Dad just couldn’t see past that.

My grandfather tried many times to come back into his son’s life, only to be rebuffed. My brother once visited him in a nursing home at the end of his life, but I never met him. He never had the opportunity to meet his daughter-in-law and to get to know his grandchildren. Indeed, he never really got to know his own son.

My grandfather didn’t leave for another woman. He wasn’t chasing skirts, the bottle, the cards or the ponies. He was chasing his dream. After years of leading a life of quiet desperation, he decided to sing his song. He left to join Vaudeville. Living out of a trunk, he traveled the country for a while with a troop of performers. Someone once told my brother that our grandfather had eventually had some success. And, indeed, an online search of the Internet Broadway Database revealed he had been a bit player in over 20 plays. He even had a small role in a movie.

The meaning of this quote seems clear. The implication is that one will live and die unhappy and unfulfilled if one does not let their song find voice. After having done so, I wonder if my grandfather would agree. I suspect not. The cost of self-expression proved way too high.

Dessert at the French Laundry

As wrong as it seems, the mundane has a way of intruding on the most extraordinary of experiences, even a romantic vacation in Paris. But because it was a vacation in Paris, even the mundane brought romance with it.

Clothes get dirty, even in Paris, and she’d put it off long enough. She decided that this morning was the time. Laundry bag in one hand and phrase book in the other, she rode the slow, gilded cage of the elevator down to the lobby of the tiny hotel in the Marais. The lobby looked like something out of a 60s remantic comedy starring Cary Grant. The velvet couches were just a touch shabby, the Aubusson carpet a bit thread worn.  At one end, a dapper-looking man worked behind the desk, which was made of a beautiful dark wood burnished by a lifetime of polish and use. Here and there, a nicely dressed Frenchman sat with a café au lait, reading his Le Monde. It was all so very French and so very elegant, especially when compared to the plastic Holiday Inn lobby back home in Des Moines. She couldn’t help but feel just a little foolish as she headed to the desk clutching her bag of dirty clothes.

100 Word Challenge: Writ Large

Graffiti Writ Large 

Bitch!”  The ugly word hung on the wall of sudden silence like graffiti writ large. 

She hadn’t expected to see her ex at tonight’s New Year’s Eve party.  If she had, she doubted she’d have had the courage to come.  But after months spent meeting with her therapist and her lawyer, she felt the self-confidence he’d so casually destroyed returning.  The settlement was hammered out and the date in court behind her.  She finally felt like celebrating the future instead of mourning the past.

Holding her head high, she replied, “Bitch? You call me that like it’s a bad thing.”

Thanks, INKYGIRL.COM. I can totally relate.

Free Write Friday: Technology

I have already confessed to being a technology junkie. Today Velvet Verbosity has prompted me to question whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

As I begin this exercise, I am caused to turn to technology over and over.  I do not have a timer, so I went to the calendar software on my computer and set its alarm for fifteen minutes.  I have never been a typist, so I would be in real trouble were it not for the spell check on my word processing software.  When the timer goes off, and I have used up my time allotment, I will clean this up and post it out there somewhere in cyberspace – and to think too much about that makes my brain cramp – where all of you can find it.  And then I will put a comment on VV, also out there somewhere, to give you an easy road map to the other somewhere the blog lives.  And none of this would have happened at all were it not for my ability to bumble about like a vagabond in cyberspace.  I wandered “out there” looking for people like me, people who had similar interests, and perhaps different takes on them.  And that led me to VV.

Good or bad?  Well, were it not for technology, I would have a world around me that was much smaller.  My wandering about would perhaps lead me to a reading group at the library, where some might be writers and most probably would not.  I might take a writing class at the community college, but I think finding a kindred soul there would be unlikely.  It is possible that over years, I would eventually find people like VV and all of you with whom to share this interest in putting words down on paper  (oh, wait, there’s no paper involved).  I would type this on a typewriter (oops, technology again) or put pen to paper.  There would be far fewer words laid down within the 15 minutes, and most likely they would have to be retyped or rewritten to correct the misspellings and sentence fragments and just plain tortured language.  Then I might put the finished product into an envelop and mail it to VV, but none of you would likely ever see it.

So far, for me, anyway, it’s all good to have this technology I enjoy. 

Has it somehow changed our minds?  Sure, no doubt.  But is that change bad?  Speaking for my mind only, I don’t think so.  My mind is no different (OK, yes, older and hopefully wiser) than it was in the 1970s, except that it has more daily “experiences” than were possible back then.  It “knows” more people, and has access to so many more points of view.

Am I addicted to my machines, and unable to think without them?   I don’t think so.  I still spend a good deal of quiet time just thinking.  I still read books the old fashioned way (though, that being said… as I write this, my husband is reading the morning newspaper on a Kindle).  I still enjoy actually facing human beings and having a conversation with them.  I still on occasion use a pen or pencil and paper.  I still capture the world around me in ways other than words on the computer, using my camera (oh, oh, it’s digital and the images residing on my computer rarely make it to paper.).

And, alas, my computer just told me, “times up!”  Bossy machine.

Post exercise note:  There was no way I could post this without cleaning it up first.  It was unintelligible.  I did not “edit” it, per se, but did run spell check to translate it into English.

After spell check, my cyper-person comes across here as reasonably well-groomed and  appropriately  dressed (never mind how I am really dressed; one of the other benefits of technology is the ability to write at home in my bathrobe!).  Before, it “looked” more like a disheveled and tattered ne’er-do-well from a foreign country.  Thank you, Technology, for making me presentable to go out in public.

Thoreau Thursday

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

This quote from Thoreau will no doubt draw varied interpretations, but I think Thoreau was channeling dogs. “Chew your favorite bone. Don’t steal the other guy’s bone. And be sure to save some for later.” Good advice. As dogs (and Thoreau) know, the simple things in life, like a good bone, are worth savoring.

Thoreau was a guy who liked simplicity, silence, and solitude. He would no doubt freak if he knew how complicated, noisy and crowded life had become. The poor man would not even have been able to find solace at his home on Walden Pond today. He would surely feel assaulted by the well over half a million people who visit his home site each year and buy “Simplify” signs at the gift shop.

Every day, we are too assaulted, by the noise and complexity visited upon us by technology. TV, radio, cell phones, pagers, computers, Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- all have crowded into our lives. Just think of that guy you saw on the street recently who had three or four little devices hanging off his belt.

In his book of 20 years ago, Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman said that the average person in 1989 received more new information daily than someone living in the 14th century would in his entire lifetime. Imagine what that statistic would be today.

The number of cell phones in the US has risen from about 1 million in 1989 to nearly 300,000,000 today. The Internet, which just “celebrated” its 40th birthday, was just a kid 20 years ago. Nearly everyone has a computer, and many people have several. We’ve gone from a handful of available TV channels in 1989 to what has to be hundreds of channels today, thanks to cable and satellite feeds. Radio now comes at us in our homes, cars, and even on cell phones. Facebook recently claimed over 2 million registered users, with 1 million of them using Facebook at least once a day.

A technology assault indeed. Thoreau would be horrified. But not I.

I love technology.

I like the Internet. I like a lot!

I like the easy access to instant gratification for a nagging question with a forgotten answer. You know the one: the answer to this afternoon’s question that always comes in the middle of the night.

I like being able to do my holiday shopping from the comfort of my desk chair, rather than driving an hour from my home in West Nowhere to the nearest urban shopping area.

I like being able to back up my opinions in a debate with researched factoids. You can always find something to support your side.

I like having my cell phone (like that much-coveted Star Trek communications device) nearby at all times. I can reach out whenever I want to, and people can reach me. I think this is a vestige of my high school need for popularity, but I still like it.

I like being able to keep up with my entire family on Facebook. They are so busy with the noise in their own lives that they rarely call or visit. But they do find time for Facebook (which will surely be identified as a social addiction one of these days). Logging on to Facebook is like traveling through a portal (like that much-coveted Star Trek transporter) into their lives.

I like TV. This is an unpopular admission today, but hey, what can I say? I like it. A recent show on PBS about Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps mesmerized me. I like having that sort of entertainment right in my living room.

I like my satellite radio. I can boogie on down the road to the Beach Boys or Beethoven, though I am partial to the Beatles. Koo koo kachoo.

Sorry, Thoreau, but the complexity, “noise,” and companionship that technology brings make me happy. And as dogs also know, when you're happy, you should dance around and wag your entire body.

This is me dancing and wagging with abandon.