Ordinary Life

I  believe I can succeed in this course...as long as I get to make my own rules. 

WHEW!  I had several story ideas based on articles  (which I may continue to develop) but I ran with this one that came from a homework session at my local MIDTOWN DELI. Each section of the day's paper was at a different table and being read by a vast array of characters. Yet we were all under one roof, reading about what was happening in our little town...  Initially I had 700 some odd words. I let it cool and fought dismay as my word count initially went up, not down.  Two painful character cuts later, I made the 300 mark.  I am submitting that version and then returning to my drafts to invite those two characters back into my diner while I shine the tables up a bit. ::ASSIGNMENT POSTED BELOW:: THE MILLCREEK MALLARD: SATURDAY EDITION   Sports & Weather  lay abandoned on the table nearest the window. Grant had placed the paper over his laptop like some kind of theft deterrent when he left to reckon with the coffee he’d been drinking all morni...

Assignment : “Think of your Censor as a cartoon serpent, slithering around your creative Eden, hissing vile things to keep you off guard. If a serpent doesn’t appeal to you, you might want to find a good cartoon image of your Censor, maybe the shark from Jaws, and put an X through it. Post it where you tend to write or on the inside cover of your notebook. Just making the Censor into the nasty, clever little character that it is begins to pry loose some of its power over you and your creativity.” I chose to sketch (and paint) my inner censor, then use its description as a writing prompt .  My rough draft (because I’m working on getting okay with sharing them):  I imagined my Censor as a many armed thing. It wears my wedding ring on one tentacle, a watch on another. In the grip of one flange is a bottle of bubbles and in that bottle the mom I’m supposed...the mom I want to be.Perhaps there is a mop in one tentacle and a set of car keys in another. Two weigh the difference betwe...

To my right: an accordion (& trumpet...& cow bells!).  To my left: a young man with autism named Odin.  The seating was communal, the meal was German. Odin and his mom were about the business of building happy memories in the wake of deep and recent loss. Odin said to us “Something terrible happened to my grandpa- he passed away.”  With Odin there was no pretense, when he needed salt, that’s all he needed and he sought it out with determination. When he thought the candles would be fun to blow out, he blew them out. We smiled and wished we could be that free, too. Sharing a meal with O was an extra scoop of joy.  Odin’s mom is made of strong stuff, yet she remains uncalloused. She leaves any excuse to be overwhelmed on the table and instead invests in the lives of her son and many others.  Jannik was our golden waiter. From a foreign land and eager to fill our cups, he was more than hospitable, he was truly kind. Employing Odin as his sidekick in the que...

The assignment: Personify a color, make hefty use of a thesaurus. What I turned in: I chose to write about one of my favorite colors. You can only see it for about ten minutes in the morning and maybe five on certain evenings and then, only on days with proper conditions. It really doesn't have a name (that I am aware of) but if it were a crayon, perhaps they'd call it Herald.  I am a color, not yet named.  Though a body could be lain to rest never having seen me (if that body were given to much sleep or staying indoors) I assure you that I am.  I ride the rim of the rising sun and throw back the shades of last night's sky. With a blast of golden trumpet, I herald the coming of a newborn day. I bathe the infant in splashes of light and wrap her in blankets of pink and glowing orange. I have written her name in the clouds with lifting birds, she will be called Possibilty. I tip-toe from the room, leaving her to d...

The assignment was to choose one of the provided prompts and complete it- with as much of a twist as we could muster. I chose the prompt: "Looking at Paris in this light..."  Looking at Paris in this light , Adkins could almost forgive the rookie his dumb mistake. Almost.  Like the flashes of amber waxing and waning over them from atop the ambulance, Lieutenant Michael Adkins alternated between looking at the shape of his mangled partner on the stretcher and out into the fog-drenched darkness of Seabridge Avenue. Too terrible to look at and too terrible to ignore, Mike's reflexes kept snapping his attention to Jimmy's face and just as quickly away.  On the stretcher, Officer James 'Paris' Frenchy, lay unconcious and bleeding. His badge dangled from his uniform and his left eye socket was empty.   Adkins sighed heavily into the thick night air. Tonight's shift already felt a year and a half long and he hadn't even begun the paperwork. So much paper...

Once upon a time, someone I know was having a very bad day. In fact, it had been a rotten week, and a rotten month, and come to think of it, when had anything ever really been a good at all?! He couldn’t remember. And so, because holidays can illuminate our prickly branches, and because the opportunity was sitting right there amongst the branches like a shiny wrapped present for the taking, my friend threw the Christmas tree, who for the record, was not being much help, down a flight of stairs. Throwing the tree, stubborn as it was, didn’t fix anything, in fact, it broke more things, including the fragile ornaments shaped like children’s hearts, but for all of three seconds, my friend was focused on something other than his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad life.  For the rest of the season however, he was secretly known as The Grinch.  What can one say?  CindyLoo Who calls it like she sees it.  She hasn’t learned nuance, yet.  But they are only alike to a p...

I woke up with a name clearly formed in my head: Whitney Oh, I think I remember... wasn't the girl who sat behind me in Pre-Algebra named Whitney? Whitney Bowles... Bolles? I am picturing her vaguely but perhaps she is an amalgamation of the many faces that never solidified into friendships throughout my ever-changing educational landscape. Perpetual new kid didn't lend itself to perpetual friendships, at least, not before social media came along to shrink the world a bit. "I will have to try to look her up when I get a second. I wonder how she's doing and if everything is okay. I wonder why she's in my head". Six hours and a lot of busy-ness passed by before the memory of the lodged name reoccurred to me. I had been busy packing suitcases for our short trip to lake country. 'Oh yeah, I was supposed to look her up. I'll get right on that...just as soon as I get the car loaded' Four hours of driving later, I had still not typed her name into a searc...

The book sat in front of me as I maneuvered between phone and computer screens. Seven spreadsheets were open in individual tabs and I moved information from sheet to sheet, trying to whittle the seven down to two coherent reports. One group would be accepted into a pilot program, the other would be politely informed that we'd had far more applicants than we planned to accommodate.  If irony exists, it may well be found in this remaining detail: the pilot program was for people who feel rejected. My job now was to reject the rejects as well as to reject all notions of rejection. .  Besides, last night had been the kind that turned into This Morning without warning- one or two quick tasks had turned into hours of fine tuning.  And so, I had made the coffee extra strong this morning I found a sliver of resolve in the bottom of my third cup of tar. I would finish these reports and re-start my day anew after a shower.  The phone rang as I scavenged the second floor for a ...

When I first saw the bowl-with-a-hole-already-right-in-the-very-bottom, I made an agreement with myself that I would not offer to adopt it until  a.) I had first put my  broken vessel   to use and  b.) I had figured out how to accentuate the bowl's natural blemish. I only kept half of the deal with myself but figured inspiration would set in by the time the bowl arrived in the mail or I would simply use the bowl in its already beautiful natural state instead of trying to turn it into an object lesson for my classroom of one. I thought I might attempt to seal the hole- perhaps with a clear epoxy I've used in the past. I would prove its usefulness despite the natural handicap it had been created with. As the days ticked past, I occasionally found myself humming "There's a hole in the bottom of the sea." and one day last weekend, without any particular song in mind, I queued up my Paul Wright playlist. It was only a short trip from ' My Everything ' to '...