Tag: legacy writing

Legacy Writing 365:3

Is this a leap year? Should I be saying 366:3 instead?

For a time in my twenties, Lynne and I lived together with a house full of dogs and her cat. The guy I was dating lived about two hours away. He didn’t have a car, and sometimes a friend would drive him halfway; I’d meet them and take him back to our little town for the weekend. It was on such a day that I was idly walking through a big discount store that was a forerunner of Walmart. I didn’t intend to buy anything; it was just a way to pass the time until the friend and boyfriend arrived.

I absolutely didn’t intend to buy one of the kittens who was with a group of them in the back of the store. These days, I’d never buy a dog or cat when so many need to be adopted and when irresponsible breeders shouldn’t be encouraged. But as ignorant as I was about such things then, even I knew we didn’t need another animal in the household. Still, there was one kitten I couldn’t ignore. He was talking to me, not begging, but demanding, and I held him for a bit and talked back. Finally I returned him to the enclosure and started to walk away. When I looked back, he was hanging by his paws from the top of the metal, as if trying to follow me out.

So Kess left the store with me.

He packed a ton of hilarious personality and bad behavior into his tiny body. He pooped in the plants, kept me up at night, and tried to nurse my throat, meaning I had to sleep holding the covers firmly over my head. He bossed all the other animals around. He was noisy. But all would be forgiven when he’d be adorable and affectionate. When he’d curl up with the dogs for a nap. When he’d eat without a sign of finicky behavior. When he’d chase a toy or lie on his back working a piece of yarn or a ribbon. When he’d bounce around the house en pointe, back arched, slaying imaginary enemies.

And some not so imaginary. One of the features of the wonderful old house we lived in was what we called “well crickets,” probably actually camel crickets. If you’re not familiar with these, go check out this photo at your own risk. The horror of these things is that they look like spiders and jump like crickets. Seriously? A spider that can JUMP AT YOU? And will, because the little bastards NEVER jump away from you. Nothing could send me shrieking from a room like the appearance of what I dubbed “leapers.”

Wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of prey that would fascinate an inquisitive kitten?

I was sitting on my bed one night, working on a lesson plan, when I spied movement across the room. I sucked in my breath: LEAPER! My body chose fright over flight. I sat rigid, hoping it would hop its way out of the room. Kess saw it, too, and dropped to the floor to fix his gaze on it, his dilated pupils driving the blue from his eyes. It jumped toward the door; he stared and slowly crept after it. It jumped again; same reaction. The third time it jumped, it was outside my room! I leaned over and slammed the door. Kess gave me an exasperated look, reached a paw under the door, and brought it back inside.

Stupid cat. He finally killed it when it stopped amusing him, but by then I was another few years closer to thirty-five.

When I was accepted into graduate school, I knew I could take only one animal with me, and that was going to be my dog. Lynne would have kept Kess, but we had some friends who wanted him. He enjoyed a long, happy reign over two human slaves and two Great Danes who devotedly served King Kess. Not a bad life for a discount cat.

Legacy Writing 365:2

When I was in the fifth grade, it was decided that the more musically-inclined students would put on some kind of spring concert. My sister was a singer who was always in choirs and choruses and she loved that stuff. I could think of nothing more horrifying than being on a stage in front of a bunch of people. People with eyes!* So when the music teacher came around to audition us, I had a plan. We sang as a group; she stopped in front of each of us to get a listen to our individual voices. I sang as poorly as I could; it didn’t take a whole lot of effort. And I DIDN’T GET PICKED! Success.

Only then the teachers weren’t sure what to do with us tone-deaf rejects during the times the other kids went to practice for their upcoming concert. My teacher, Mrs. Duncan, hit on a brilliant plan: Her leftovers would be in a play! How exciting! I would have lines to say in front of an auditorium of people!

Please reread my third sentence in the first paragraph.

That’s how I came to play “Dottie” in “The Picnickers.”

I still have a copy of “The Picnickers,” and I read through it before I began this post. The plot: Several girls decide to go on a picnic on a pretty day. They pack their picnic baskets and sneak off without letting the boys know, because:

Maxine: I’d like to know if they ever ask us to go on hikes with them.
Helen: I should say they don’t.

and

Mary Lee: We’ll show them that we can get along without them once in a while.

(Yeah, fist pump, Mrs. Duncan, if in fact you wrote this play.)

The girls get lost a few times, but finally find the spot they’re looking for. They play a few games; Mary Lee, obviously conflicted, periodically says how much more fun they’d be having if the boys were there. A few pointed comments are made about Betty’s hunger, and they won’t leave her behind when they go to the spring to get water because, as Helen says, “There wouldn’t be anything left to eat when we got back.”

(In a few decades, Mrs. Duncan, you’d be in big trouble over the whole young girl/body image/eating disorder thing.)

While they’re gone, the boys show up. Miffed about being left out, they switch out the girls’ picnic baskets for other baskets filled with turnips and carrots, raw potatoes, and stones. The boys then hide. When the girls get back and open the baskets, even Betty suffers a loss of appetite.

At this point, one of the boys emerges from the woods disguised as a gypsy (“gypsy” not having been replaced with the more aptly named “Romani”). Here’s where my willing suspension of disbelief switches off. A gypsy? Because the woods outside AnySmallTown USA are crawling with gypsies in gypsy clothes. And of course a group of girls would totally talk to her and let her tell their fortunes, as well as agree to give up some of their food if she does a magic spell to get their lunch baskets returned. This shit would never fly today, when Maxine would whip out her cell phone and have the police there to arrest the pagan child predator in nothing flat.

But I digress. The gypsy taps on a tree three times, the boys appear with the good food, “Tom” is revealed to be the gypsy, everybody laughs, eats, and they live happily ever after–or so I assume, because the last page of my script is missing.

Regardless, my real issue with this play is that my character Dottie is critical, bossy, and doesn’t deserve the totally suck-up fortune she gets from the gypsy (Tom obviously has a crush on her).

WAY TO TYPECAST, MRS. DUNCAN.


Me, bottom left.

*Line stolen from Rachel on Friends.

Legacy Writing 365:1

You may have noticed that my masthead changed with the new year. Since the Magnetic Poetry project has come to an end, I wanted to take on another year-long project. My conditions: It has to be uniquely mine, and it has to involve writing. My blog readers (and I thank EVERY one of you, especially when you take the time to comment) seem to enjoy it when I dip into my past for material. Since I have about ten zillion photos in the archives that include many of my mother’s photos as well as mine, and a seemingly infinite amount of memories, I hope to combine the two on my blog each day.

My relationship with memory has a certain poignancy. I have no children who will say, “Tell me about that time…” or “Not this story again…” as I often did with my own parents. They were both storytellers, so it seemed particularly cruel that both of them suffered diseases that rob the memory: my father’s Parkinson’s disease, my mother’s Alzheimer’s. However, though both of them had moments of confusion and disorientation, they could be gently guided into sharing their long-term memories until shortly before they died.

In a way, my novels are my children. They get sprinkled with bits of stories from my own life and the lives of people I know (or have known): meshed, reassigned, shortened, made better, made worse. Whatever works to breathe life into the characters. When these stories are read, they’re filtered through everything a reader believes, likes, distrusts, yearns for, laughs about, despises–the whole gamut of that reader’s experiences are sitting in his mind and heart.

In essence, all writing is collaborative. We write everyone and everything we’ve known or wished we knew. We work with editors and friends and critical readers to shape and refine our stories. And then our readers rewrite our stories to fit into their unique perspectives.

Over the past year, I’ve read a lot about the process of memory, and its accuracies and inaccuracies. I’ll try to be accurate with both the photos and what I remember.


When I was going through pictures to create the new masthead, I found this one. I correctly identified: SOFTBALL! I don’t know how my father, a good softball player on winning teams, produced me. The Brides and Kathy S try to get me to come to their games, and I always babble things like “softball trauma,” “junior high nightmare,” or a simple shrieking, “NOOOOOOOOOO.” I’m pretty sure there was never a worse softball player than my early teen self. Even after I was finally schooled on the basics–a base? a shortstop? a strike?–I was hopelessly inept.

Keep your eye on the ball? You keep YOUR eye on the ball and make sure it doesn’t come anywhere near me. I closed my eyes when a ball came from the sky when I was practically in the next county, which is where my “team” in P.E. sent me to get me as far from the game as possible. If a ball did manage to turn itself into a rookie-seeking missile, it went through my hands, through my legs, or hell, I don’t know, through the fabric of the space-time continuum.

And batting: OMG, the nightmare that was batting. You are supposed to stand there while someone hurls a ball at you! A ball that can hurt when it hits you! I just closed my eyes and hoped it would somehow dematerialize before it came near me. Needless to say, I never heard or felt that alleged satisfying crack of bat meeting ball. Or got to run to first base–though I think I may have walked a time or two. All of this, of course, to the taunts and jeers of the opposing team. And my own team. And possibly people brought in from biology or civics just to watch me. Which, praise the spirit of whoever is the softball equivalent of Babe Ruth, my father never saw. He never had to know the shame of fathering Jacksonville High School’s WORST Softball Player.

Kathy S looked at this photo and said they don’t make bats like this anymore. They do still make great softball players…I’ve heard.