Life and novel are sucking the blogging creativity out of my marrow these days. So I am going to continue “liberating” ideas from my gentle readers and friends on an as needed basis until further notice.

Today I borrow once again from Alicia who kindly blogged this for the purpose of supplying me. Many thanks, dear. It’s meant to be a meme, but I am using it as a “starter” like the prompts I would write for my students when the whiteness of page blinded their inner muses into mute, deer in the headlight silence.

A – Age: I am 45 and a half, but sometimes I feel much older – like when my knees ache on damp, rainy days or after a long mountainous hike. And sometimes I feel much younger. Like when I am listening to my step-daughters talk about the new Star Trek movie or their plans for the summer and beyond. It doesn’t seem possible to me to have “children” who are so grown. My niece Chance is getting married in the fall. She’ll be 24 soon. That is an old and young thing so rolled up I can’t even begin to separate it. She was four when I met her. I gave her crayons and paper and she drew while her mom and I worked on lessons plans for an organization unit we were creating for the sixth graders. Soon she is going to be married and even more my peer than my daughters. Astonishing.

B – Band listening to right now: The iPod is currently playing A to Zed. I think I am in the D’s. Very random and probably why my knees hurt so much. I am walking lost in the memories of music.

C – Career future: Alicia mentioned that the concept of career was a concept indeed and I concur. I have never really thought of what I do as a career because work has never consumed or defined me. Teaching was for a long time something I really liked to do. It was fun. Blogging, even during the dry spells, is fun. Writing fiction is challenging but still technically fun under the heading of “better than work at Starbucks”.

My goal is to write fiction and supplement by teaching, creative writing hopefully, though I toy with the idea of being a yogina. My current instructor is keen to expand and take on other instructors. If we end up staying here in The Fort until Rob retires, that would be okay too.

D – Dad’s name: It was Donald. In his immediate family I don’t think I ever heard anyone refer to him as “Don” or “Donnie”. Mom called him “Don” as did most of his friends.

E – Easiest person to talk to:  Rob is the easiest person to talk to about anything. I can carry on conversations with most anyone, but the depth level will vary with my trust in a person, and I can seem to be very open even when I am not at all.

F – Favorite song:  I don’t have a favorite above all others. Every song I have ever heard is connected to single moments or whole eras of my life in such a way as to give them meaning. I can hear a song and remember who I was pining for or what movie I’d just seen and with whom or where in the world I was at that moment. I don’t think songs are like flavors of ice cream or running shoes. The variety should be infinite and they should evoke feeling that puts you back in the moment. Music is a true time machine.

G – Gummy Bears or Gummy Worms:  Gummy anything disgusts me. And I hate picking it off my teeth. Most unpleasant.

H – Hometown:  Dubuque and Des Moines are my hometowns because I grew-up in both places. Dubuque is where I literally grew up and Des Moines is where I actually became an adult.

I – Instruments:  I studied piano for four or five years as a child. I played the baritone and the bass clarinet in high school. I occasionally fight off the urge to buy a guitar because I long to learn to really play an instrument well enough to simply sit and pick out tunes I know and sing along. It’s easy to resist the impluse buy because I play string instruments left-handed despite being a rightie. I took violin lessons for a short time when I was in 4th grade. I was a natural but it conflicted with recess and playing ball, so it was short-lived. But I instinctively use my right hand for chords/note and strum/bow with the left. A leftie like Paul McCartney. Can’t explain that. Anyway, you don’t run across many guitars that are strung for lefties. You have to ask special.

J – Job: Have had plenty of them but never found the early ones to be anything other than legalized slavery. I don’t understand at all why people don’t rise up in revolt on a daily basis given the mindlessness of what they do. Teaching as I did I contributed to the sheople herd and it bothers me.

K – Kids:  I have some of those. The older girls were out on Father’s Day. Grown children are amazing. They carry on conversations. It’s different with Dee who still talks at me or asks me questions. 

L – Longest car ride ever:  The drive to Dubuque when Dad was dying. We went straight through and as we meandered up and down the rollercoaster that passes for a highway between Sioux City and Ames, I began to wonder if we weren’t caught in some Twilight Zone time loop because we never seemed to get closer to where we were going. It was a Friday night. High school football in every little place we stopped.

M – Mom’s name:  Ruth is her name. Like the book of Ruth. When I was little, I had a coloring book that told stories from the Old Testament. One was the tale of how Boaz had negotiated for the widow, Ruth, with her in-laws. He gave them one of his sandals. I think it was a show of good faith, but my parent’s friends thought it was hysterical that Ruth could be bought for the price of a shoe. They took to calling Dad “Boaz” after that. They were wrong. Ruth was not bought. She was a widow and therefore got to decide whether or not she would marry again. Her mother-in-law was the one who urged her to consider Boaz and remarriage because she was young and had a long life ahead and didn’t owe that to her husband’s memory or his mother.

N – Number of people you slept with: Ever? Why would anyone ask – or even more foolishly, answer – such a question. On a nightly basis, I sleep with Rob. I think that’s enough information.

P – Phobia[s]:  I am generally speaking a fearful person, but can’t think of anything that freaks me out to the point of simply not being able to do it. I could do anything if I had to. I really dislike the dentist but that’s because most hygenists are ham-handed.

Q – Quote: “Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.”

Jane Wagner said this. She is best known as a collaborator of Lily Tomlin’s but I discovered she also wrote the CBS School Special, J.T. which is just about one of my favorite childhood tv memories. It’s about a boy in Harlem who finds a sickly cat and makes a home for it despite his family being too poor to afford a pet. I was about seven maybe when I first saw it.

R – Reason to smile: I am loved.

S – Song you sang last: On my walk yesterday I skipped “E” and most of “G” but I sang along with Kenny Rogers’ Gambler and The Gourds “Gin and Juice” remake of the Snoop Dog song. Of course I sing Carpenters, even when it is sad beyond what should be allowed and Abba is a give regardless.

T – Time you wake up:  Between 6 and 7:15 depending. Now that the blinds are up and school is nearly out, I am hoping for 8AM. I really need to catch up on some sleep. Any sleep.

U – Unknown fact about me: Because there are plenty of those left now.

V – Vegetable you hate: I am not keen on artichokes.

W – Worst habit: I forget to turn lights off. I got into the habit of leaving lights on all the time shortly after Will died which was odd because it had been just Dee and I on our own for well over a year and I hadn’t any fears about the dark at all. I think it accelerated though after the Creepy Guy next door found out Will had died and began watching me all the time. Then there were the escaped fugitives that hide in the green spaces around where we lived that fall, triggering a manhunt complete with closed streets and SWAT teams moving neighborhood to neighborhood.

Now it is just a bad habit that drives Rob to distraction and I am working on it with varying degrees of success. I am getting better but mostly because Dee, who copies everything Rob does and says, has taken to reminding me as well.

X – X-rays you’ve had: What an odd thing to want to know about a person. My wrist – which was broken. My ankle – which was not although I ripped all the ligaments. Chest x-rays for pneumonia. Upper and lower GI’s. My urinary tract (because they thought at one point I had only one kidney and a deformed uterus which turned out not to be the case at all). I have also had ultrasounds for gallbladder issues and pregnancy. I think, all in all, that my internal self has been well-charted.

Y – Yummy food: There is much yummy food to be had in the universe but most of it is off-limits. I find conversations about food and events where food is the focus or omnipresent to be profoundly distressing/depressing.

Z – Zodiac sign: I am a Sagittarian with Sagittarius rising born in the year of the Water Rabbit. I think my moon is in Taurus or Virgo. In the end this makes me a contradiction and not everyone’s cup of joe.