An Aries (Who Knows Some Stuff)
Current Photo Friday theme: Mother
Dorothy Jean, March 2007
Her 81st was her last healthy birthday. Tom and I took her out for dinner (she chose Red Lobster), and she ordered a decadent chocolate dessert to celebrate. When the waiter, Bryce, couldn’t find a candle, he lit his Bic while we sang happy birthday so she’d have something to blow out when she made her wish. She was ready to make him an honorary grandson. Photos like this one keep me grateful for cameras.
Lightness and darkness. Lightness and heaviness. Sometimes, I feel heaviness settle. I try to find ways to sit with it, consider it, and then let it go.
I sat outside and blew bubbles for you. Bubbles are nearly weightless. They float on air. They catch and reflect light. Their beauty is fragile and fleeting. Each bubble carries a bit of our breath with it, but the air and our bodies are quick to replenish our lungs. Inhale. Exhale.
When the heaviness and darkness come, I try to remember the lightness of you and our time together.
I tore out another reverse coloring page. I took circles from Kendra Norton’s book, and then I outlined them and as artist Andrea Nelson suggests, “rounded off the corners.”
I remember to breathe.
Theirs; today. They had thirty-eight years and three children together. She lived another twenty-three years without him. Not a single day goes by that I don’t think of their lives, their personalities, and their stories.
…I play games. It began with one game, Spelling Bee, in my news feed. I didn’t play it the way other people played it. I had a single goal (there can be several with this game), and I waited until the next day to learn if I’d accomplished my goal (you can get immediate online solutions from many sources, but for me, waiting was a deliberate exercise in patience). I thought of the game as my mental acuity test: How well is my brain working this morning?
Through my same newsfeed, I started checking out Connections, and I was surprisingly good at it and got even better over time. Occasionally, I only correctly guess all four groups because the fourth is made up of my leftover choices, but once I see the answer, it makes sense, and I realized I sometimes have to put my logic aside and try to guess the game creators’ logic.
When the online game Wordle took off in 2022, I briefly glanced at it, but it didn’t grab me at the time. I knew several people who played, including Tom, Jim, and Timmy. Then, for whatever reason, Jim, Timothy, and I began talking about Wordle since Jim played it, and the next thing that happened was that both Tim and I began playing, and he, Jim, and I began sharing our game results in our ongoing text thread.
Online games are a slippery slope. Among the three of us, we are now playing and sharing our scores for:
And those include daily and weekly Quordle, and daily and deluxe Waffle. Other than Framed, all of them are word games (none of us, as far as I know, has interest in Sudoku, which is Tom’s numbers game, and so far, we haven’t ventured into any online crosswords games). We each have our games we’re strongest at, and let me assure you, Framed, in which you get six chances to identify a film based on six still photos from that film, is NOT my strong game. To entertain myself despite my abysmal ignorance of so many movies, I make up titles or choose actual movie titles that are so far from the actual movie that I have a secret hope the game creators have some kind of algorithm that provides them with the worst/silliest guesses.
However, it’s possible Framed has had a different impact on me. I’ve become aware of a lot of movies I might enjoy, and as a result. I’ve decided the summer months, when Houston’s heat is so daunting, will officially be Ethan Hawke Summer. When I need a mid-afternoon writing break, and I want some passive entertainment, I’ve started a list of Ethan Hawke movies the dogs and I can watch together.
As long as Ethan doesn’t interfere with my morning games (they take about fifteen minutes total to play) and my daily writing/research or cause me to burn things in the kitchen, this should work out (and possibly save me from some of the trauma of election season).
One day, back at The Compound, I picked up a fresh 4×6-inch canvas and chose my paint colors, only realizing sometime into my painting that I was being influenced by the painting on the wall behind me.
It was a painting my father gave me, which I suppose one might call an unpaid commission, since I said, “Please paint me a city.” I gave him no other parameters, and this is the large canvas he painted and gifted to me. I’m SO, SO glad I gave no input, because nothing I could have said would have been as beautiful and perfect for me as this abstract is. It has traveled and lived with me since, and now it hangs over the fireplace in the library at Houndstooth Hall, where I get to enjoy it every single day.
Recently, when we celebrated my birthday, Rhonda and Lindsey gave me this great coloring book, The Reverse Coloring Book, from Kendra Norton. The colors are there, and the person coloring the page gets to decide how to use the shapes and colors to create their own work of art.
This page made me think of The City, so it’s the one I chose to work on in honor of today’s date. April 18 is when my father died in 1985. I know I’m one of the most fortunate people in the world not only to have endless memories of a good father (and trust me, having endured my teenage years, my father might be surprised at how I always praise him), but also so many tangible memories of his creativity. I never went inside a museum until I was in my thirties, but I’d long been prepared to fall in love with art.
I’ve seen some great versions of that coloring page online with people using pen and inks, adding architectural features to the buildings, and even including some foliage at the ground level. I chose to keep mine simple and make it another homage to my father’s.
Thank you, Daddy.
I actually am not writing today, or haven’t so far. I’m mostly outlining on paper, and mentally, a bunch of possible scenes and plot points that will eventually bring the Neverending Saga to a close. And when I write those words–“to a close”–my brain can’t quite conceive of it. It isn’t that I want to drag this out forever, like a nighttime TV drama where characters go through more jobs and marriages and crises in seven seasons than most people will ever experience in their entire lives. (Or, for that matter, a daytime TV drama, where characters die and return to life on a consistent basis, and sometimes they look very different, and sometimes they’ll die again and return looking like their original version. Soap operas are a delight in that way, and I say that sincerely.)
I’ll be happy when all my deserving characters are happy and doing what they should be, and then I’ll leave them alone for a while. If I rewrite the second and third 1990s novels, many of these characters appear again in supporting roles. Plus I have three strong ideas for completely unrelated novels. I have much I can write, but I’m not anywhere near saying goodbye to this group yet.
I do reflect a lot on what I changed from the 1990s versions, and I’m happy with those choices. I provided backstories where there were none. I changed or let go of certain storylines that I never thought I would, but doing so opened up so many better possibilities. There were people who read those 1990s books and said they loved them, and I have no way of knowing if they would love these.
If I were to tell you some of the ways these seven manuscripts I’ve poured my time and heart and effort into for the last seven years have been a means for a few people to criticize, belittle, or disrespect me, you might wonder why I keep going. It’s okay. The books and I are still standing. The people who respect what I do or who love me are still supportive in a range of ways. The others are either no longer a part of my life or if they are, I mostly stopped talking about writing with them (sort of the way most of us avoided talking about politics, religion, or our problematic relatives before it became a thing to share all that over social media–with words and videos–and now we can’t avoid it by moving to the other side of the globe because our phones will deliver it all to us 24/365. My detractors are safe from this rambling commentary since they also don’t read this blog.).
I had a lovely period of time once when things I wrote were published. Maybe I’ll get to experience that again. Maybe not. Publishing didn’t bring me riches or acclaim or the security that I’d always have a writing career. It brought me happiness, a sense of fulfillment, and the understanding that I’m able to follow through and finish things.
Some day, I hope you’ll come along for the ride with the Neverending Saga.
And remember…
April 6 was National Tartan Day. Though I’ve s-l-o-w-l-y come to embrace my sister’s research that showed our lineage is Scottish, not Irish, which I was told all my life, information given to me by my college running buddy Kathy about Thomas Cochrane, tenth earl of Dundonald, whose burial place she saw at Westminster Abbey, helped pique my interest. You can see a little of the Cochrane tartan on that button.
And you can see how that interest in our Scottish side led me to this. I still keep these dolls in their kilts on display in the writing sanctuary every day. Muses.
I misdated this post so it published on Saturday instead of Sunday. I went back and put my actual Saturday post where it was supposed to be, corrected this one to April 7, and noted that National Tartan Day was April 6. Computers and me sometimes…
Rhonda, Lindsey, and Pepper joined Tom, Debby, Timothy, me, and the hounds for a brunch celebrating my March birthday. There was food, conversation, cake, present-opening (The Brides brought gifts for all the birthdays missed in December, February, and the upcoming May birthday because they won’t be here), and then there were games and more conversations.
A really fun and much needed day with friends that I appreciated so much!
Current Photo Friday theme: Afternoon
The Houndstooth Hall pack groovin’ on a Friday afternoon: Anime, 10 years; Delta, 9 years; Jack, 8 years; Eva, 5 years. All rescued; all loved.
A very sweet friend sent a strand of wooden Whirly Pigs for my birthday. She knew and loved Aaron, making this a perfect addition to Aaron’s Garden.
I forgot to take pictures during the daylight after Tom hung it, so the lighting isn’t great. When the wind blows, the feathers become spinners. I can’t wait to see it in action when we get a good breeze. I’ve collected pigs most of my life, and feathers are a reminder of Aaron that his mother once shared with me.
Thank you so much! ❤️