A New Year . . . and a Writing Resolution

Admittedly, I have never been one to make New Year’s resolutions.  Generally, for me, the first day of a new year comes and goes, with little–if any–fanfare.  But this year’s a little different.  My creative output has been quite small the past couple of years.  After The Eye-Dancers and its sequel, The Singularity Wheel, I simply wasn’t struck with many ideas that jumped out in front of me, demanding my attention.  On the rare occasions when they did happen, they had only temporary appeal before fading away, like background music you slowly walk away from.

Until this past week.

It was the way it often happens–sudden, like a bolt of lightning in a cornflower-blue sky.  Unasked for.  Unexpected. As I was taking a walk (something, by the way, that I’ve often found to unlock a helping of creativity), I had an odd memory come to me.  Ninth grade, years ago.  A different century.  One day in science class, we had a substitute teacher.  I still remember his name–Disraeli.  And that’s exactly how he referred to himself–not “Mr. Disraeli.”  Just “Disraeli.”

 

He eschewed the regular lesson plan that day, and instead quizzed us on riddles and mind-teasers.  He offered puzzles, multiple-choice philosophical questions.  He even read from his own books–passages that he believed to be enlightening.  And they were.  He didn’t seem to care about the syllabus or what we’d been learning about in the weeks prior.  He just took his day and taught what he wanted.  I never saw him again.

But he left an impression.

From that memory, a story idea emerged–at once related and unrelated.  The idea also revolved around a high school substitute teacher–but this one is an English teacher.  Call him Mr. Robbins.  He, too, ignores the lesson plan on his one day teaching a particular class.  It’s ninth grade, a snowy day in upstate New York.  The students are feeling lazy, unmotivated . . . until Mr. Robbins asks them a probing question.

 

“Are you alive?”

Some of the students pause, briefly, then shrug.  Others laugh, thinking it’s a joke.  But one student–call him James–sits there, rapt, listening to the substitute teacher’s lesson.  It’s not a question James has ever asked himself.  But he’s a cerebral introvert, enjoys reading, thinking.  He’s all ears.

Mr. Robbins carries on.  He explains that our lives–if we are lucky and not stricken by poverty and oppression or war and famine–are generally spent on mundane things–getting up in the morning, brushing our teeth, eating breakfast, doing homework (which elicits an understanding groan from the class), finishing chores, going shopping, riding the bus, getting stuck in traffic.  On and on.

 

But there are moments–graduations, weddings, reunions, deaths, first loves, a game-winning home run–that stay with us, where the stakes rise, the importance magnifies, and our brains tell us, even at a subconscious level–to remember.

Do we, though?  Yes, we remember bits and pieces.  But, even with life’s monumental moments, there is much we forget.  And the mundane things?  They come and go like the wind, like breath on a cold morning, here one minute; gone the next.  So much of our existence is forgotten–almost as though it were never lived at all.

 

And so, Mr. Robbins asks again, “Are you alive?  Really alive?  If you forget your life away?  If nothing lasts in your memory aside from a few cloudy details here and there?  Is anything real?”

He really has James’s attention now.  The ninth grader hangs on Mr. Robbins’s every word.

The substitute teacher then explains a method he’s devised–a way of capturing memories, moments, as they happen–recording them on paper in such a way that, ten years hence, twenty years, thirty years, forty–you can reread what you wrote and the experience will come crashing back to you like Niagara Falls.  By this juncture, the majority of the class is fully tuned out, openly talking amongst themselves, not worried about what a zany substitute might do to them.

 

But James listens.

Mr. Robbins carries on, making eye contact with James several times, as if understanding he has a serious acolyte, someone in the sea of freshmen before him who might learn and practice and realize.  He explains that, as soon as possible, within minutes of the moment you want to memorialize, write it down.  Capture it while it’s fresh.  But don’t write like a standard journal entry.  No.  Write in a structured way, detailing what happened, factually and specifically.  The time frame–how long it took.  Who was involved–what were they wearing?  What did they say?  Facial expressions?  What perfume or cologne were they wearing?  Where were you?  In a public place?  Describe it!  As many details as you can.  In your house?  What room?  What time was it, exactly?  Were there dishes in the sink?  Was the TV on in the background?  What was it playing?  Essentially, a detailed record of events, capturing everything–every detail.  No matter how minute, how seemingly insignificant.  Leave nothing out.  Anything can be a trigger later on for the brain, for the subconscious to remember the event you are chronicling.  One detail can serve as the lead domino that, when knocked over, slams into all the rest, allowing the memory to come alive decades later when the entry is read.  In this way, you can capture moments of your life–they can be big or small, singular or mundane.  If you want to memorialize what you had for breakfast and how you feel on a given day, do this same process.  It will stick.  It will work.

 

And then, after you record every detail you can possibly think of, then, at that point, write how you feel.  What is it about this moment you are capturing that sticks with you?  What effect does it have on you?  Write that down.  And then–you have it.  As much as you can remember something years later . . . you will remember this.  Your vivid writing of events and your immediate reflections afterward, etched on the page, will preserve as much as is humanly possible.  Like an heirloom, an organism preserved in amber, it will remain, able to be called to the surface of your conscious mind whenever you read it.  Do this with enough life events and you will leave a preserved record–not so much for others (though they would certainly be able to ascertain much from your detailed accounts), but for yourself.  For your ability to remember and recall.

 

To live and not to forget.

Such is the story idea I have.  Essentially a journey into what makes a life a life.  What does living mean?  Why do we remember what we remember, and are we more fully alive if we find a way to vividly remember more moments of our lives.

I surely won’t finish this novel in 2024.  But I’ll start it.  And make a memory.

 

Thanks so much for reading!

Mike

With My Back to the Class (A Moment Remembered)

When Mrs. Northrup asked me to stay after class, I knew something was up.  But what?  I hadn’t done anything wrong.  At least not that I could remember.  Worried, my mind raced feverishly, like a top spun out of control, trying to figure out why she wanted to see me.

 

“Michael, I know you’re shy,” she said once the rest of the students were gone.  Now that was an understatement.  I wasn’t just shy; I was the shiest kid in the class, by far.  Mrs. Northrup was a veteran, though–she had taught first grade for decades.  My older sister and two older brothers had been her students several years earlier.  As had many others.  She had a reason for saying this.  She had something planned.

I remember the late afternoon sunlight filtering in through the windows, dust bunnies swirling in the air.  The janitor, Mr. Thompkins, was out in the hall, sweeping the floor.  At that moment, I just wanted to go home.  It was a Friday; the weekend was here.  I knew my mother would be waiting out in the parking lot.  Hopefully Mrs. Northrup wouldn’t keep me long.

 

“You’re one of my best readers, you know,” she said.  A compliment!  So maybe I was in the clear?  “And I know you might not want to, but I feel it would be good for you to read aloud in front of Mr. Johnson’s sixth-grade class upstairs.”  With that, she handed me a single piece of paper, old-school typewritten words printed on the page.  I can’t recall what the words were, or what they were from.  That detail has been swallowed up by the gulf of years.  But I do remember thinking that page looked like it would take a long time to read aloud in front of sixth graders!

 

Mrs. Northrup smiled.  “First thing Monday morning, after attendance, I want you to go up to Mr. Johnson’s class, by yourself, knock on his door, and proceed to stand in front of his class and show them how well a first-grade student can read.  Okay?”

I nodded.  But I felt the panic rising.  I couldn’t imagine reading in front of students that old.  Heck, I couldn’t imagine reading in front of students my own age!  Why was she doing this?

“I think it will be good for you,” she said.  “It’s time to break out of your shell.”

Well, actually, I liked my shell.  It was snug and warm in there.  I was perfectly comfortable, thank you very much.  But I didn’t say any of that.  I just swallowed hard and nodded again.

 

“Run along, now,” Mrs. Northrup said.  “You have a big day on Monday.”

As I left her classroom and passed Mr. Thompkins out in the hall, I wondered how it had all come to this.  Five minutes ago, I was looking forward to a fun weekend.  Now I was dreading the passing of time.  I hoped Monday never came.

But it did, of course.  It did.  And, true to her word, Mrs. Northrup directed me to Mr. Johnson’s class after roll call.  She even made a big deal of it by telling my classmates.  Ugh.  Was there a hole I could fall through?

I still remember exactly how it felt climbing the stairs to the second floor that day in old Abraham Lincoln Elementary School.  With each step up the stairs, it was like I was nearing my execution.  The paper Mrs. Northrup had given me on Friday–the one I needed to read to the sixth-graders–was in my hands.  I held on tight, as if the paper, the words on the page, might imbue me with strength and quiet my fears.

And then, there I was.  Outside Mr. Johnson’s sixth-grade classroom.  His door was half-open.  I could see the room full of students.  Big students!  Sixth-grade students.  To my six-year-old mind, they looked like giants sitting there, waiting to judge me.

 

Mr. Johnson spotted me outside his doorway.  “Michael!  Welcome!  We’re expecting you.  Mrs. Northrup tells us you have something to read to us.  Come on in!”

I felt an urge to flee, to just turn around and run.  But a few weeks earlier, Mrs. Northrup had asked me to do something I didn’t want to do (the specifics of that request lost to time), and, instead of doing it, I’d pretended to get sick and went to the school nurse.  A few minutes later, Mrs. Northrup was there, in the nurse’s office, telling me to get up and come back to class–she knew what I was up to.

So, this time, I was stuck.  I couldn’t try something like that again.  Mrs. Northrup was strict.  I didn’t want to be relegated to her dog house.

 

I looked into the room–it appeared cavernous, an educational Grand Canyon, filled with intimidating big kids who were all looking out into the hallway–at me.  So I did the only thing I could think of.

 

I entered the classroom, with my back to the class, sidestepping in like an acrobat on a tightrope.  I affixed my eyes to the blackboard at the front of the room.  Behind me, I heard a couple of the sixth-graders giggle.  Mr. Johnson looked at me from his desk.  Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw him smile.

 

And then, I proceeded to read my paper from beginning to end.  I read it to the blackboard, my back to the class.  And when I was finished, without pausing for a single second, I sidestepped out of there, my back to the class the entire time.  I never once faced them.

From there, I went back to my first-grade classroom, where Mrs. Northrup greeted me.  “Bravo, Michael!”

I didn’t tell her what I’d done.  That I hadn’t faced the sixth-graders.  I just went back to my desk.

When my mother picked me up after school that day, she asked me how it went.  I just said, “Okay.”  I had read to the sixth graders, hadn’t I?

That evening, after supper, Mrs. Northrup called.  My mother talked with her for just a couple of minutes.  About halfway through the conversation, she burst out laughing.  Mr. Johnson had clearly relayed my performance to Mrs. Northrup, who was now informing my mother.  Who then told my father and siblings.  After a little while, the entire neighborhood knew.  I didn’t mind.  The story became something of a legend in my family, like a treasured heirloom.  “Do you remember the time when Mike . . .”

 

I think back on such moments now with a sense of nostalgia, a deep appreciation for what was–for family and childhood and memories.

Little things.  Just random memories.  Experiences from our youth.  Quiet moments.  These are the kernels of stories, of songs and poems and novels.  We don’t need to write about “big” things or earth-shattering adventures.

We just need to tell our story.

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

Precious Moments, Precious Memories, and the Love That Binds It All

Time–the meaning of it, the concept of it, the passing of it–has been on my mind of late.  Memories.  Moments.  Days that come and go, like smoke on the wind, like vapor.  The transitory nature of our lives.  The inexorable passage of years.

This month, I lost someone unspeakably dear to me.  It is hard.  Life will not be, cannot be, the same.  It happened fast.  One moment, they were there.  The next, they are gone.  A dreamlike mist has descended over many of my senses.  Past, present, and future all merge into one, a coalescing of time and space and matter.  I reach out to touch a memory.  It is there, real, actual, and yet immaterial.  It slips through my fingers like a lake breeze.

 

Time is an illusion, the concept of it a construct of our need to place order on the infinite, the divine, the universal.  Certain memories from decades ago feel as if they happened last week; while some memories from last week feel decades old.  There is no ticking clock at the soul level, no segmentation of hours and days and weeks and years.  There is only a long, flowing undulation of experience, meaning, and love.

 

Indeed, it is the moments of our lives that matter most, the people and places we connect with, the memories we establish and cherish, and hold onto like talismans of the soul.  These are eternal.  They are stored away in the secret recesses of the heart, there to be called upon whenever we think of them, and oftentimes when we don’t.  They can rise to the surface of our consciousness at the most unexpected of moments.

Sometimes these memories, these moments, are painful.  They can elicit a longing, a crying out, a lamentation.  But I have learned that they are precious.  They are what makes us, us, and they are to be cherished and nurtured like the gifts they are.

 

For me, I have always needed to write things down, to preserve them on the page (or the computer screen).  Real-life experiences are often sifted through the mill of the creative process, emerging in stories and characters and scenes and lines of prose that pour forth from the subconscious.  This will be no different.

In the end, it’s all about love, I think.  That’s what makes the memories so alive, the emotions so overpowering and enduring.  It is love that defines us and shapes us.

“Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself,” Khalil Gibran wrote a century ago.  “Love possesses not nor would it be possessed.  For love is sufficient unto love.”

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

Gym Class Dread (Or, Silver Linings in the Discomfort)

It’s a funny thing.  My junior-high and high school physical education experience is now decades in the rearview mirror, from a previous century, no less.  And yet, those memories of 1980s and 1990s gym class are still vivid.  Some of the most enduring school memories I have stem from PE.

 

Admittedly, some of them are good.  I was heavy as a teenager, and I didn’t play on any of the official school teams.  But I was surprisingly good at sports–probably because I had two older brothers, and I always wanted to keep up and compete with them.  Out of shape?  That I was.  But I had my skill sets!  And every now and again, I would overcome the gym class nerves and excel.  There was the time I played goalie in an indoor soccer game, and there was a substitute teacher that day.  I was diving and jumping and making improbable saves.  When one shot got through and the other team scored, the sub teacher came up to me and asked my name.

 

“Mike,” I said.

“Well, Mike,” he replied.  “You can’t save ’em all.  You were great today!”

Obviously, the positive reinforcement of this stranger, who I’d never see again, resonated with me.  I still remember it decades later!

There were other high points, too, scattered through the debris of PE memories, pearls amidst the wreckage.

The trouble was . . . gym class psyched me out.  I hated three-quarters of the activities we did.  And when we played a sport I wasn’t good at, I dreaded making a fool of myself.  The instructors, too, always made me nervous.  You never knew what they were going to do.  One of them even used to loosen his sneakers and kick them at us.  Another one would make us do calisthenics for half the period before we played any sports.  I usually approached gym class with dread.

 

Nothing was worse, though, than square dance.  Every year, usually in late winter, we’d do square dance for a couple of weeks.  The teachers would bring the boys and girls together, line us up opposite each other, and have us choose partners.  Well, when I was sixteen, no girl wanted to dance with me.  I was overweight and had acne.  It was mortifying.

To make matters worse, the teachers would break out an ancient (even for back then) record player.  I hated that record player!  It was the same music they played every year.  I’d have nightmares about it.  I can still hear the performer on that record–a guy trying so hard to sound cheerful, telling us to “face your partner,” “swing her round and round,” and “do-si-do.”

 

There were times when the dance called for us to switch partners midstream, and the girl I was switched to usually rolled her eyes and made it clear she didn’t want anything to do with me.  I often wished a hole would open up right there in the gymnasium floor, and that I would fall through it straight to the center of the earth.

 

The gym teachers were oblivious.  They smiled and clapped and tapped their feet on the floor.  The period would last no longer than forty minutes, but it felt like ten hours.  And yet . . . and yet.  I welcome these square dance memories.  Along with all the other memories from PE that are cringe-worthy and embarrassing.  Why?  I suppose because they re a part of my life, an aspect of my adolescence.  They played a part in shaping the adult I would become, for good or ill.

And maybe (probably), they keep me in tune with being a teenager, with growing up, with the awkwardness and social angst of adolescence.  Perhaps memories like these help me to get inside the head of the youthful protagonists I write for.  One can only hope!

 

Also, my next writing project will be a collection of personal essays, a trip down the proverbial memory lane, if you will.  I’ll be culling and cultivating experiences I had growing up and writing them down.  Childhood memories, teenage memories, take us back decades (well, some of us).  They consist of events that formed something in us, something strong and enduring, at the core of our being.  Remembering them, writing about them, sharing them . . . maybe that can cultivate a feeling of community, of oneness, of togetherness.  Maybe that’s what writing is, or should be, at its heart.

An outlet available to each of us where we express ourselves, who we are, what we believe, and hope it touches at least one other person who reads it.

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

 

Lemonade, Back Porches, and Lazy Days (Or, What’s the Rush?)

What’s your to-do list look like today?  This week?  This month?  If you’re like most people, it reads like a Victorian novel, with never-ending lists, sentences that carry on for an entire page, and a heft and a volume that is downright intimidating.

 

Given all of this, do you often find it hard to relax, slow down, decompress?  Most of us do.  And maybe the season of summer is here to remind us–it is okay to take the foot off the gas, every now and then, to drink that iced tea or tall glass of pink lemonade.

 

Where I live, in the rural hills of east-central Vermont, there are, at this time of the year, hundreds of fireflies that appear on my property, as if by magic, when night falls.  They swoop and soar above the meadow out back, they zoom forward just outside the window, flickers in the dark.  Sometimes I just stand at the window for several minutes and watch.  Think.  Take it all in.  Slow down.

 

Summer is a time for long. lazy days, back-porch conversations, slow walks along a country road.  (Or through a city or suburban neighborhood.)   The sun is high in the sky, the air is hot, the nights warm, like velvet.  Nature itself is inviting us to take a long, deep breath.

Indeed, when it comes to stories–novels or movies, stories I read or write myself–oftentimes my favorite scenes are the interludes, the quiet moments when the action slows down, when the conflict subsides, and when the characters can take a moment and share a laid-back give-and-take, enjoy a meal, or just hang out, unhurried.  Scenes like this, which some find boring, strike me as relaxing, the narrative inviting me to join the characters and put my feet up.  To stop always being in a hurry all the time.

 

So, maybe we should take the hint.  Listen to the rhythms of the season, the warm nights, the long days, the long, languorous humming of the cicadas overhead.

Pour that lemonade, open a good book, and relax.  What’s the rush?

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

The Myth of a Moment (And How the Written Word Can Make It Real)

You hear it all the time.  Behavioral experts, motivational speakers, philosophers, life coaches . . . “Live in the moment.  Stay in the now.  The moment we’re in is all we have.”  Fair enough . . . on the surface of it.  But when you take a step back and really look at it . . . what does this mean?  And what, in fact, is a moment, anyway?

 

Is a moment the single second we are living in, the instant in time that is “now”?  If so, it is over and done so quickly, before we can “live it,” it is gone.  For example, if you and I were standing in line, waiting for an ice cream cone, and I said to you, “How’s your day?”  What is the “moment”?  By the time you hear those words, the “moment” is over.  Maybe your response–“Great, how’s yours?”–is the moment?  But that, too, is finished before I have time to think about it or even respond to it.

 

Is the “moment” the entirety of the conversation?  Maybe.  And if the exchange is limited to a few passing pleasantries, perhaps this is as valid a definition as any.  But what if the conversation lingers and persists for five minutes?  Ten?  A half hour?  An hour?  (It’s a LONG line!)  Then what?  Is the “moment” the full hour?  Or is it broken into individual seconds, each too swift to grasp?  Individual minutes, maybe?  What chunk of time do we label “a moment”?

Additionally, do we remember our moments?  If they come and go with the blink of an eye, if we can’t even fully experience them when they happen (by the time our brain processes them, they are already in the past), how on earth do we remember them after the fact?  Obviously, we remember big things, certain memories and events that stand above the fray, things we carry in our hearts like buried treasure for the entirety of our lives.

 

But think about it.  Over 99 percent of our “moments” are gone from our conscious minds, erased, as if they never happened.  Now, I believe they are still inside us–at a deep, subconscious level.  But, short of dreams or perhaps hypnosis, they are inaccessible, tantalizing but unable to be grasped.  Trying to recall the vast majority of moments even from yesterday, let alone last year or ten years ago, is like attempting to hug the wind or encase an aroma in your hands.  It cannot be done.

So, where does that leave us?  Can we really “experience the moment,” after all?  We compensate in a holistic way.  I can’t remember what I did yesterday at precisely 9:04 a.m.  But I can remember what I did, in general, yesterday morning.  I can’t remember what my brother did on December 1, 2007.  But I have a collection of memories of my brother, culled and collected over time, that define my experiences with him.  In short, our memories, our moments, even the people we love, become composites, a vast collection of individual experiences brought together, coalescing in a formed and layered collage, like a building continually being added onto, story by story, row by row.

December 2007 calendar

 

It is often frustrating–this inability to step back within the eye blink of a moment, the limitations of our conscious memory, which forget the vast majority of the moments of our lives.  We do the best we can with what we have.

But there is something that fleshes out moments, that pours concrete under the foundation of events and experiences.  And that is the written word.

Indeed.  What’s your favorite novel?  To Kill a Mockingbird?  Wuthering Heights?  The Shining?  Maybe you’ve read it a dozen times.  You know the story well, inside and out.  But can you, from memory, quote the fifth sentence on page 138?  Of course not.  Like a “moment,” it is gone–experienced once (or several times), but no longer a part of your conscious memory.  With a novel, though, with anything written and preserved on the page, you can check.  You can go back.  You can turn to page 138, and you can relive that moment, and you can reread that sentence!  You don’t have to combine disparate words and chapters into a blended whole.  You can go granular, and experience individual sentences again, and again, and again, if you so choose.

 

That is the magic of the written word.  It makes things permanent.  It takes a fleeting moment, a scene, a paragraph, a sentence, and it tattoos it to the page, forever accessible, forever able to be read, and experienced, again.

Magic, indeed.

So . . . you want to live in the moment?  Remember moments from the past, with crystal clarity?  Then grab a book . . . and read.

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

Through the Wisps of Time (the Past and the Present Merge)

Just the other day, I stumbled upon something I hadn’t seen in years.  I was cleaning out an old dresser drawer, and at the very bottom, like a treasure hiding beneath mounds of stuff, shyly avoiding discovery, was an old cassette tape.  Yes, a cassette!  A relic.  An artifact from a distant age, from a previous century.

Scribbled on the tape’s label, the words “Dave the Great” greeted my gaze, in my older brother’s neat, distinctive handwriting.  Dave the Great.  He used to take on that persona as a kid and perform interviews–often with himself.  He’d pretend to be Howard Cosell and he’d interview, well, himself, as a professional baseball player, offering a running commentary of his latest triumphs.  Or he’d simply introduce himself as Dave the Great and interview anyone who happened to be with him when he clicked “record” on the tape player.

 

And for this particular cassette, hiding in my dresser for years, I was the person he interviewed.  The catch?  I was five years old!  Indeed.  The cassette bridged the gap between centuries, taking me back, back, back, forty-plus years, to a January morning long before email existed for just anyone . . . or blogs, or the internet as a household medium, or smartphones, or social media, or self-driving cars.  It was a world full of landline telephones, handwritten letters, a world where, when you needed to discover something, you called up the reference librarian at your local library or maybe looked it up in a hard-backed encyclopedia.  Years ago, a chasm of time between then and now.

 

Curious to see if the old cassette still worked, I discovered a dusty tape player and inserted the cassette into it. And sure enough.  The old analog technology was working, a warrior of the decades, grainy and not as clear as it might be, but good enough.  It was my brother’s voice, at thirteen.  Clear as day.  Penetrating as the frost on that day four decades ago when he made the tape.

 

A few minutes in, he introduced . . . me.  And then I spoke . . . or who I was spoke, when I was five.  As I listened, I laughed out loud.  My voice was so high, a little kid’s voice, as if infused with helium.  The give-and-take with my brother echoed across the deep recesses of my mind, traveling through the years like a time-traveling space ship.  So long ago.  And yet, there we were.  Having a conversation in the very same house I’ll visit again sometime this spring, where my father still lives.  Past and present merging into one.

 

Many details are forgotten.  Most, sadly.  Forget four decades.  What did I do last week?  It’s a struggle to remember the day-to-day events of our lives.  They happen in an instant, replaced, inevitably, by the next moment, and the next, and the next, and the next, in an ongoing catalogue of movement and motion.  Nothing stays still.  Nothing stays frozen.  We are always stepping forward, second by second.  Individual moments, those pixels that make up our lives, dissolve into invisibility before we know it.  What did I have for breakfast last Monday?  Who knows?

 

But as I listened to the old cassette, from so many years ago, there were actually snippets of the conversation I recalled.  I could see us there in my brother’s bedroom, the snow falling outside the window, the slight hum of the heat through the vent.  Some of the things we said on that cassette–they brought me back to that moment, to being a little kid again.

 

And maybe, as much as I might wish I could remember everything . . . maybe that is enough.  Though details fade away into oblivion, the main story line lives on.  What the brain forgets, the heart remembers, and if we take a moment to be still (even though that moment will instantly melt into the next one), we can access the emotional memories of our heart, and we can capture them with our words, or our pictures, or our dance steps.  We can represent.  We can share with the world–or whoever is listening–something about our truth.

For now, I will just play that old cassette again, and I will listen to my brother at thirteen and myself at five.  Will something creative come out of it?  Maybe.  Or . . . maybe it already has.  I just need to find it.

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

One Step at a Time (Or, the Link Between “Drop Foot” and Creativity)

Until this past October, in the shadows of Halloween, I had never undergone surgery.  I’ve been lucky.  But this fall, that changed.  I had a fairly straightforward and noninvasive surgery done on my lower back called a microdiscectomy–where the surgeon makes a small incision and then goes in and removes the extruded matter from a herniated disc, freeing up the lumbar nerve root that had been severely compressed by the herniation.

 

In my case, this disc herniation in the low back resulted not so much in sharp pain, but in a condition known as “drop foot.”  Drop foot results in an inability to dorsiflex–or lift your foot up at the ankle, making it very difficult to walk with anything resembling a normal gait.  All the research I did (and the fact that my own brother had the same thing in 2018!) made me realize that surgery was needed, and quickly, to minimize the the chance of the nerve damage being permanent.  Some of the nerve damage to the L5 lumbar nerve root in my lower back likely *would* be permanent.  But a prompt surgery would, with hope, bring back at least some of the functionality of my affected (right) foot.

 

The surgery went well.  I had never been “put out” before, and it was an interesting sensation.  There was no sense of time having passed.  I closed my eyes, and–it felt like one second later, I opened them.  I soon realized I had been out for close to three hours.

 

The weeks directly after the surgery were challenging.  At first, you’re feeling worse, not better.  But slowly, as the days bled into weeks, and as I tried acupuncture for the first time in my life, I began to regain a little bit of strength in my right foot.  First, the ankle was offering more support, then I was able to raise my toes a bit more, then flex the foot up a bit more.  By the time the holiday season was in full swing, I was able to walk without a foot brace, and had regained perhaps two-thirds of my natural gait.

 

And that’s about where I still am today.  I can move around quite normally and don’t feel all that restricted.  As the long Vermont winter eventually recedes, I will again take the mile-long round-trip walks to the mailbox every day, and mowing the lawn is actually something I am looking forward to, come May!  I look forward to putting the foot to the test.

Throughout this process, it’s been important not to rush things.  The damaged lumbar nerve root needs to time to heal.  The weakened muscles that raise the foot need time to regenerate and strengthen.  It is a process, a step-by-step approach, literally!  And it made me realize–recovering from drop foot and writing a novel (or any long creative work) are very similar!

 

With a novel, you often get an inspiration.  An idea flashes.  Scenarios merge.  Characters form out of the creative ether, ready to come to life and populate the story.  But the novel isn’t written in a single day.  It takes time, multiple drafts, edits, starts and stops, and to see it through, you must persevere through the doubts that inevitable arise, the nagging insecurities that at times scream like a howling wind racing down the mountain passes.

 

“Will the story come together?”  “Will the characters pop?”  “Will readers like it?”  “Will anyone even read it?”  “Will I even finish it?”  Or . . . “Will I be able to walk again?”  “Will I be able to mow the lawn, get around without a brace?”  “Play sports again?”

The questions nag and persist, trying to trip you up, sometimes seductively subtle, weakening you piece by piece; other times, they are loud and obnoxious, in your face like a schoolyard bully.  The only thing that matters is how you respond.

Keep going.  Don’t stop.  Don’t give in to the doubts.  Just keep grinding through.

Step by step.

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

The Sibling’s the Thing (Or, Broken Bones and Unpaid Bets)

In The Eye-Dancers novels, siblings play a sizable role–and a dominant one in Joe Marma‘s case.  This naturally evolved during the writing of the stories, but also it is a reflection of the siblings in my own life.  As the youngest of four children, I know firsthand what it’s like to share a household with multiple siblings growing up.

 

In my case, I am more than seven years younger than my next-oldest sibling, so there is an age gap–nothing that matters now that we’re adults, but back when I was a little kid, my siblings were already in high school.  They seemed like full-fledged grown-ups to me.  And sometimes, they were tasked with watching me–especially when we visited the neighbors’ pool across the street.

My family used to have a pool when I was too little to swim.  But by the time I could actually use a pool, it was long gone.  And so we’d use the pool in the backyard of the neighbors’ house–kitty-corner and across the street. (In fact, these neighbors were the same family the Marmas were inspired by in The Eye-Dancers!)

 

I remember especially the summer I was eight years old, I would go over to their pool every day.  Joe and his brother did not use the pool much, and so it was usually just me–and sometimes my brothers.  My mother would often be there, too, to supervise.

But one time she tasked my brother Dave to watch me.  He was outside the pool.  I was the only one in the water.  “Don’t throw anything into the pool!” my mother had warned us before we crossed the street and I jumped into the pool.  She knew I liked to play “diving catches” in the pool, where someone would throw a ball several feet away from me and I would dive to try to catch it before it hit the surface of the water.  As luck would have it, that day, there was a volleyball in the neighbors’ backyard, not ten feet from the pool.  How could we resist?

 

“Dive!” Dave said, and whipped the ball just out of reach.  I dived, reached for the volleyball.

Crack!  My left pinky snapped back, the force of the ball rivaling a Nolan Ryan fastball.

Houston Astros Nolan Ryan pitching

 

“Ow!”  I grabbed my finger, the pain immediate and sharp.  The game ended as fast as it had begun.

I wound up with a broken pinky for the summer.  My mother was not pleased.

Another time, later that same summer, once my pinky had healed enough for the cast to be removed, my other older brother, John, made a wager with me.  He was in the pool with me. He knew I liked to submerge and swim underwater from one end of the pool to the other multiple times, seeing how many laps I could complete before needing to come up for air.

“I bet you ten bucks you can’t make it across the pool underwater six times,” he challenged.  My record was four.  Six was a stretch.  But I accepted the challenge.

“Ten bucks?”

 

“Ten bucks,” he reiterated.  In the 1980s, to an eight-year-old, ten dollars was a fortune!  I was all in.

“You’re gonna owe me,” I said, and dove under.  I made the first two laps easily.  The third was a little harder–I was starting to feel the lack of oxygen.  The fourth lap–my old record–was harder still.  Then the fifth–I was venturing into uncharted waters, never having stayed under this long before.  But I made it, tapping the far end of the pool.

Can I make this last lap? I wondered.  I seriously considered coming up for air, losing the bet.  But I wouldn’t give my brother the satisfaction.  I kicked off the side, determined to complete the final lap.

My lungs felt like they would rupture; I was getting woozy.  But I made it, tapping the side of the opposite end and surfacing.  I gulped in the air, letting it slide down into my lungs like a healing balm.  I couldn’t talk for several seconds, gasping, regaining my wind.

 

Finally, I said, “I want my ten bucks!”

My brother swam up to me.  “I can’t believe you did it!” he said.  “I didn’t think you had a chance.”

“Fork it over,” I said.  “When we get home.”

“What?  The ten bucks?”  He smiled.  I didn’t like the looks of that smile.  “Here.  Ten bucks.”

And he proceeded to hit me on my upper arm.  Ten times.

“There!” he said.  “There’s your ten bucks!”

I laid into him, told him it wasn’t fair.  But all he did was laugh.

Now, decades later, I look back at both of these scenarios and smile. I sure wasn’t smiling when they happened!  But now they are treasured memories.  It is memories such as these–little things, anecdotes, small events really, but monumental in their own way–that inspire me to write.  To capture something of the spirit of youth, of my past, of life in a previous century.

 

I am grateful and blessed for the memories.

And yes.  My brother still owes me ten bucks.

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike

From the Micro to the Macro (Or, a Red Squirrel Tells a Story)

Imagine this situation.  A writer (let’s call her Jane) has a story idea–something that resonates, will not recede into the background, and something that, as if having a life of its own, continues to progress and grow and mature.  Jane is fired up, enthusiastic, and prepared to put in the long hours to craft a novel.

But she hesitates.  Despite wanting–needing–to write it, she pauses and thinks about it.  Her mind is all too ready to issue doubts and protestations, reasons to chuck the project and go back to reading others’ work instead of creating her own.

 

“Your idea’s too small,” her inner critic says.  “It’s so common, so run of the mill.  It’s just day-to-day family stuff, domestic life.  Who cares?”

Jane shoots back that she cares, and, as the author of the piece, doesn’t that count?  Doesn’t that matter?

But her inner critic is unrelenting.  “You have to come up with something bigger.  Bolder.  More exciting and universal.  Don’t waste your time on what you have now.”

Angered by the thoughts swirling in her own head, Jane feels an urge to punch . . . what?  Her own thoughts?  Her own doubts and fears?  But how can she do that?  And besides, maybe her inner doubts are right.  There is little violence in her story.  No international politics or major business deals.  No espionage.  The movers and shakers of the world do not appear.  It’s insular, isolated, just a mother, a daughter, a beloved cat.  A few friends.  Small-town settings, and small-town goings-on.  She’s writing about her memories.  Her loves and passions.  But they are small.  Who will care?  Who will be engaged with any of it?

 

She sleeps on it, tossing and turning through the night.

Early the next morning, Jane takes a walk through the woods that surround her home.  It is fall, there is a bite to the air, but it is invigorating, wakening, a tonic to her senses.  Fallen leaves crunch under feet.  Squirrels chatter nearby, scolding her for the intrusion.  Chipmunks dart to and fro, preparing for the winter ahead.  Songbirds twitter, mostly unseen, from the trees.  A particularly brazen red squirrel darts in front of her, on some mission that, evidently, cannot wait.

 

And that’s when she realizes.

To that rushing squirrel, at that moment, in this remote, out-of-the-way corner of the globe–no human voices to be heard, no car engines roaring in the distance, no city noises or excitement for miles around–this is the universe, the be-all and end-all.  It is everything.  Perhaps no one but Jane will ever know of this squirrel.  Perhaps her eyes are the only human eyes who will ever see it.  But that doesn’t matter.  This squirrel’s mission, this squirrel’s task, is the most important thing in the world, here and now, in this place.

 

And, she realizes, isn’t that the same for us?  For the lonely widow with no one to talk to you?  For the homeless person, down on his luck, trying to figure out a better way?  For the high-end executive, alone, at night, stressing over the details of the latest progress report?  For the little boy or girl, with two days before summer vacation, looking forward to two months without homework?  For the neighbor down the street who everyone disregards as “boring” and “dull” and doesn’t really talk to?

We all have stories.  Our lives are comprised of moments, thoughts, hopes, dreams, triumphs, sadness, and countless “mundane” things that make up the bulk of day-to-day living.  To us, as individuals, our “little problems” are the universe.  They are our stories.  And they are worth sharing.

 

Because what you are feeling today, countless others are, too.  What I am struggling with in my day-to-day, many others are, too.  Are there differences?  Of course.  We are each our own person, with our own unique set of experiences and thoughts and feelings.  But there is a thread, invisible perhaps, but as real as the air we breathe, that links us.  We are both unique and universal, individuals and a part of the whole.

There is no such thing as a story “too small,” a subject too “mundane.”  If someone is living it, feeling it, if someone is moved by it, then it can reach others, too.  It can serve as both a window and a mirror, a reminder that we are all different, but all inextricably connected.

 

So, if you have an idea about a “small” thing, a particular “mundane” situation, write it.  Share it.  Give it to the world.

We will all be better for it.  And, if we are looking, really looking, we will see the macro in the micro, and recognize ourselves in the story.  And maybe, even learn something new about ourselves (and those we know) along the way.

 

Thanks so much for reading!

–Mike