Becca Rowan is a writer and the author of Life in General, a collection of essays about mid-life as experienced by an American woman in the 21st century. Becca loves creating connections by sharing stories on her popular blog.
Aside from that little problem of getting older, birthdays are one of my favorite days. I think it's important to celebrate the day of ones birth, and to give it the importance it's due.
So, as I celebrate my own birthday this week, I invite you to write about birth-days, how you celebrate them, why they're special, what you like best (and least) about them.
When my son was small, we played a creative sort of game in which he (the artist) would draw pictures for a story which I (the writer) would write. I would lay on his bed with sheets of plain white paper beside me and start out..."One bright, shiny morning," I wrote on such a page, "Peter and Benjamin decided to go into town." Then I would hand the sheet to Brian, who waited expectantly beside me at his drawing table, a box of 132 Berol Prismacolor pencils at the ready. His little hands fairly flew across the page, creating the magical cartoon figures of Bear Town that were like members of our family in those days, creating an illustration to accompany my words. We developed quite a rhythm, and I learned to write quickly so as to keep up with his lightning imagination. If I faltered for a moment, or stopped to think too long, he would urge me on impatiently. "What next?" he would say, literally bouncing up and down, practially grabbing the sheet out of my hand before I was finished putting the words on it. When the story ended, we'd create a construction paper cover and add it to our growing collection, volumes of stories for every occasion a small boy might wish to write or think about.
We were good partners in those days, and honestly, I've never since experienced such a fluent collarboration. We were almost like two halves of the same mind. But children can demonstrate creative fluency in a way that we as adults sometimes forget. They aren't encumbered by rules or fears, the woulda shoulda coulda's that adults concern themselves with when undertaking creative endeavors. As Brian's art teacher once said, it was as if his pencil were connected directly to his brain. There was no critical middleman to stop his creative flow.
That's what makes true fluency possible, being able to connect directly and without fear to the soul of an idea, and allow it free expression. My life doesn't often allow me to do that nowdays, but thanks to those afternoons spent with a small boy, I have a marvelous memory of how glorious it can be.
"You know our good neighbor is moving away," G. told me one day last summer when I took over a letter of hers that was mistakenly delivered to my house. "I know," I said sadly. She was referring to our across the street neighbor, whom we all called by his nickname, Bud, but whom she always referred to as "my good neighbor."
It was a fitting moniker - he was the man who brought in our trash cans if they blew into the street, collected the mail or watered the flowers when we were on vacation, supplied us all with bounty from his magnificent vegetable garden throughout the harvest season. He was particularly good to G., a widow in her 80's who lives in a big four bedroom house on 1/2 acre of land. He did everything for her ~ from replacing light bulbs to clearing snow to putting gas in her car every Friday.
"I just don't know what I'll do without him," she said with a small shake of her head.
We all feel that way, for he was a man of remarkable goodness and generosity. Oh, he had his prejudices, similar ones to many people of his generation. But deep down, he believed in the golden rule, and he lived it to the hilt.
From his easy chair in the living room he had a direct line of vision to my house. "When are you gonna slow down a little, doll?" he'd say, after watching me go in and out of the driveway six times a day. He was always the one to call me if a package was on the porch, or if I'd forgotten to close the garage door. From the day I moved in here as a new bride, almost 34 years ago, he was like my benevolent protector, one I called upon many times.
But now he's gone, packed up his own 55 years of memories in that house and moved his wife and aging Basset Hound south of here to Ohio, where he'll be within a stone's throw of his two daughters and his grandchildren. "We need to be near our kids now, " he said wisely. "We're gonna need people to help us pretty soon, and I don't want to have to call on the neighbors to do it."
Isn't that ironic? Even in the end, he was being a good neighbor.
So now we're waiting for our new neighbor to arrive - a young man in his late 20's will soon be moving in. Maybe I"ll bake some cookies for him, take some treats for his dog. Offer to pick up his mail if he's going to be away. A young man all alone like that might be in need of a good neighbor. I can be one I suppose - I certainly had a good teacher.
"We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbor."
~Gilbert Chesterton
My favorite old neighbor moved away yesterday, and each time I look across the street to his darkened house, I feel an unexpected pang of emptiness. Good neighbors are rare and fleeting these days, and often mean more than you know.
Write about
Good Neighbors
I've been going around the house whistling and humming all evening - mostly tunes from South Pacific, because I'll be playing keyboards for the show when it goes up at Franklin High School later on this month. The songs from this show are all familiar, and catchy - the kind that lodge in your inner ear and keep repeating in your mind like a computer on endless loop. But Rodgers and Hammerstein's composing skills aren't the main reason I've been singing around the house tonight.
Mostly, it's because I'm happy.
I'm happy because I got to spend some time pursuing my dream this afternoon. Well, one of them, anyway. They one that let's me play the piano and make music with other people.
Its not really a big dream, at least not anymore. Oh, I suppose I might once have harbored fairy tale like visions of walking onto the world's famous stages and pounding away at Beethoven's Emperor concerto on a nine foot Bosendörfer grand. Nowadays, I'm satisfied to sit down for a few hours at my own beloved Kimball and play away. I'm even happier if I have something to work toward - like a choral competition to accompany, or a musical performance. This month I have both, an embarrassment of riches for someone who has curtailed her musical '"gigs" in favor of more hours behind the other keyboard (the computer!) in her office. The one that actually earns real money.
I've come to the conclusion that dreams don't necessarily need to be huge to be satisfying. If you become fixated on some magnificent big dream, you might miss out on the opportunity to savor a very rewarding portion of it in real life. Chances are, I'll never play a nine foot Bosendorfer on the stage at Carnegie Hall. But I can still sink my ten fingers into the sweet resistance of 88 ivories, still hear the melody and harmony that issues forth, still race up and down the keyboard with reckless abandon.
So I'm living the dream after all.
How about you? Are you living any of your dreams, in a big or small way?
~ for Sunday Scribblings
