Monthly Archives: August 2008
My father turns 81 today. Something of a miracle really as the doctors have had us outfitting him for a casket more than once* over the past three years.
He is a very lucky man. Not because he has survived long past medical predictions but because he used the time to make amends to his family and to be a better husband and father with the extra time he was granted.
Not many people would have fought like he did or work as hard as he has to remain around and rebuild burnt bridges and build new memories. He had much to atone for and, in my opinion, he has acquitted himself admirably.
I imagine that many people would wonder why long life has been granted to someone like my dad while so many other – younger – people were not as lucky. He certainly didn’t merit the time if one were to look closely at the choices he has made and the people he has hurt by them.
But life really isn’t interested in our opinion. It keeps its own counsel as to who reaches old, old age and who does not. There are reasons. And they aren’t our business.
I don’t know if Dad even has a favorite song. It wouldn’t be rock or pop because he loathed the stuff we kids listened to as we were growing up. The only music he ever listened to at all was country and big band. In fact he met my mom at a dance and they did their early courting on the dance floor.
My father is a man who not only knew how to really dance but he loved to dance.
Happy Birthday to my dad then. A lucky man. A good man.
*Dad got sick around the same time as my late husband began his final decline and has cheated death on a regular basis since. In fact, Will’s first bout with pneumonia occurred when I was propping up my mom during Dad’s first surgery following recurrent TIA episodes. My father was upset that he couldn’t come and help out while Will was in hospice. He is really the only one of my family who wanted to see Will when he was in hospice. No one really visited him but BabyD, me and his mom for the entire three months – but that is another story.
Last week it was 1976 with side trips to 1992 and 1974. My political awakening, understanding and jading. Politics, though it touches our lives in ways most of us barely acknowledge if we realize it at all, are not what brings music to our soul or dance to our toes.
The summer of ’93 brought me back to writing via a pocket sized notebook I took along to New York City. I was staying with a friend, Lisa J, who was in one of what turned out to be three different internships. I think it was surgery that time because she was doing a lot of needlepoint. I remember being a tad disappointed when she didn’t settle on pathology because I thought it would be cool to have a medical examiner for a friend.
Her apartment was one of those renovated old buildings/warehouses in Brooklyn with a doorman. It was within walking distance of the subway station. She instructed me in its use during a day trip to Manhattan. We went to the Battery and took the ferry out to Ellis and Liberty Islands. Someday I would love to go back to Ellis and just sit and write. There is the start of a story waiting there for me, I think. I have no interest in Liberty. That surf pounding last scene in Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston curses the American goddess has turned the statue into something I will forever identify as creepy and apocalyptic.
I wrote and wrote and then went home and taught writing to 8th graders, who were frankly not much of an outlet. I have never truly enjoyed teaching writing to children when it went beyond the building blocks. Most of them – like most adults – suck when pushed to be creative. Competency can be taught but flair and the ability to tell a story? Not so much.
It was the next year that I wrote my first novella. The same one that I am slowly transforming into a novel right now. The inspiration came from a week long seminar my SisFriend and I took at Grinnell over the summer. I can’t remember the instructor’s name anymore. Morris Something or perhaps that was reversed. He was very – different.
I had taken the seminar before through my school districts AEA. It was a quick way to rack up credits towards re-certification. The first year had been a Thomas Jefferson scholar named Clay Jenkinson. He gave lectures while in character. That was a bit freaky.
He was cute though – that rumpled, long haired professor thing – and all the middle-aged women at the seminar damn near broke each others bones to sit with him at supper in the dining hall every evening.
I was invited to eat with him once after I mentioned that I didn’t care for the characterization of Ophelia in Hamlet. I have always found her “mad” scene after the death of her father to be over the top. I may have also admitted to thinking that Hamlet is one of the most selfish characters I have ever read. An opinion I still hold.
Getting back to Morris then, he had us write a short story based on an illustration taken from the Chris Van Allsburgh book, The Mystery of Harris Burdick. Interestingly I used that same book as story starters for my students.
So I wrote a novella. I had people read it for the purpose of feedback. I revised it many times and it was one of the pieces I submitted to the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa.
And I got rejected. The end.
I just didn’t have the self-confidence to write and put it out there. This despite the fact that I took creative writing courses over the summers before and after that where I received quite a bit of praise and admonishments to try and publish.
Jump ahead with me to 2006 and masters seminar. I tossed out my written presentation on a whim as I listened to the presenter ahead of me and, riffing off her, totally winged it. The guy who gave his thesis presentation after me was toast. Poor guy. But one thing came out of that presentation that I should have seen coming and yet it caught me a bit off guard when I heard myself close with “…I had thought that obtaining a masters would renew my interest in education and instead it has shown me that what I am meant to be is a writer.”
Epiphanies. They aren’t angels’ bells on a Capra-esque pine, but they jingle just as sweetly.
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