Unsettled

It's late April, and our weather is still very unsettled.  Every day brings something unexpected - we have wind, rain, hail, sun, all within the space of an hour or two.  Yesterday the sun was shining beautifully, the mercury rushed up to 75 degrees, but the wind was howling like November.  After the long difficult winter, we need spring to settle in so we can all relax. More than the weather is unsettled, too.  I've been fretting about a dear friend and her teenaged son who are going through some very difficult times.  For some while now, he's been having emotional problems, and they are culminating in some very painful circumstances  for the whole family.  My friend is such a good mother, such a caring, responsible person, with all the same hopes and dreams we all have for our first-borns.  And yet I'm fearful that those will never be realized, and that life will always be a struggle for this boy of hers whom she loves so much.

Although they haven't gotten a definite diagnosis, Dr. Becca's five-cent's worth is that it's  Asperger's Syndrome.  The signs are all there, and if I think about it, have been there since he was small.  Obsessiveness, lack of eye contact, difficulty engaging with other people, outbursts of anger.  Now that he's a teenager with the tumultuous changes inherent in that stage of life, all these symptoms have converged to create havoc in the poor kid's head.

My dear friend tries so hard to be practical and upbeat while maintaining a grip on reality.  Yet when she refers to her son as "my boy," the catch in her  throat makes my mothering heart ache.  So when I awoke again to another day of heavy, wet, oppressive skies and then heard the sound of pouring rain pounding the roof, I couldn't help but shiver a little.

Unsettled.

How about you?  Is your world on an even keel these days, or are you feeling unsettled too?

Support System

Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room.  Life isn't a support-system for art.  It's the other way around.  ~On Writing, by Stephen King

These lines appear at the end of a chapter in King's book in which he discusses a difficult time in his writing life, a time when he was drinking a lot - a habit that was wreaking havoc on his family life.  In King's mind "creative endeavor and mind altering substances" were entwined, and he feared that without drinking, he wouldn't be able to write.  Alcohol had become a flawed support system for his writing life.

As writers, we seek support for our creative endeavors, hopefully in more positive sources than alcohol or drugs.  Sometimes it comes from a trusted friend or spouse, or from a set of rituals that surround our writing habits.   But at the end of the day we must be self-supporting, must look within for the confidence to sit at the desk in the corner of the room and meet our ideas head on, mold and shape them into something worthy of putting on a page.

How about you?  Are you a self-supporting writer? Do you have  healthy support systems in place to sustain your creative endeavors?

Dreaming of Writing

,,,and I mean that literally. Last night, I had quite an interesting/disturbing dream.  In it, I was writing but the character was actually alive and in front of me, and words were simply gushing out of my head about him.

Yes, that's the really interesting part.  This character was an old-school detective, a guy retired from some police force who had taken his battered desk from the precinct and set up shop on his own as a investigator.  At one point, I woke up and opened my eyes, but the words just continued flowing in my head, right where I'd left off in the dream.

Ordinarily, I'd say this "vision" was trying to tell me something.  Is this guy supposed to figure in my writing life somewhere?  Really? An old-school gumshoe detective?  I don't even read those kinds of books.

But I got to thinking that he probably emerged in my mind because  I watched an episode of Detroit 1-8-7 we had leftover on our TiVo.

Still, I'm encouraged to be having writing dreams.  It must mean the creative juices are flowing, don't 'ya think?

I just hope next time it's a character that's just a wee bit more identifiable.

Because I Said So, That's Why

When I was a child, that was the only explanation I ever received when a rule was established, or I was chastised for breaking one.  Otherwise know as the Parental Edict, it carried just about the same weight as the Papal utterance by the same name.  Once invoked, it brooked no argument. Why do I have to eat my vegetables?

Why do I have to go to bed now?

Why can't I stay out after dark?

Because I (meaning mother, father, grandparent) said so, that's why.

Nowadays, I think it's quite different.  My son might tell you otherwise, but it seems to me I spent an inordinate amount of time explaining why he had to obey some rule or perform some task.

"Because in order to be healthy you need to eat a balanced diet, and that includes vegetables."

"Because your body needs to sleep in order for you to grow."

"Because it's dangerous after dark - bad people and scary bugs come out."

My son is 31, so I suspect that parents today get into even more involved explanations. It is the information age, after all.  They probably look things up on the internet to come up with justifications for doing the things I had to do with no explanation other than the famous Parental Edict.

I started thinking about this the other day when I came across a web story about using two spaces after a period when you type.  That's the way I was taught way back in the olden days, but apparently it is now completely verboten. The most interesting thing about the story was the explanation regarding the origins of the two-space rule.  You see, when typewriters were first invented, every letter was the same size and took up the same amount of space on the page.  It was felt that leaving two spaces after a period allowed the reader's eye a respite, and made comprehension easier.  With the advent of word processing, letters are automatically compressed proportionally, so the two space "breathing room" is no longer necessary.

Of all the people who told me to leave two spaces after a period (Mrs. Brown, my 5th grade teacher; Ms. Jarret, my junior high journalism teacher; and Sister Gertrude, my 10th grade business teacher) not one of them ever offered me an explanation about why I was supposed to do that.

Other than, of course - Because I said so, that's why.  Or, its famous corollary, Because that's the way it's always been done.

There's a story my parents often tell about me as a toddler.  "Your favorite word was 'Why?'" my mother recalls affectionately.  "You were forever asking "why" about everything!  One time, I guess I was tired of your questions, and I asked you why you were always asking that.  Your reply was 'How am I ever supposed to learn anything if I don't ask why?'"

Good point, isn't it?  How do we know if we don't ask?  How will we ever find out if we don't wonder, don't question, don't seek a different answer other than the ambiguous or the tried and true.  I guess at some point in my life, I gave up asking "why" and started accepting the pat answer I was always given, which implied that somebody, somewhere, knew better than I.

But I think I need to go back to my earlier questioning nature, and start looking for better answers.  There may be lots of things I've been doing that I might not have to bother with anymore.

After all, it never hurts to ask.

How about you?  Do you have a questioning nature?  Do you insist upon explanations, or are you content with the old standby answers?

A Special Date

My husband has turned into quite a reader - he's got nothing on the ravenous reader,  of course, but he eats up at  a couple of books a month.  Time was, he did well to slog through a novel a year.  As a matter of fact, I used to buy him a hardcover book on his birthday in October, and that usually lasted him until our anniversary in May when I'd get him another one. No more.  In fact, our anniversary's coming up next week, and I'm having a hard time thinking of an appropriate a gift.  Oh, I could buy him a book - in fact, he's got his eye on the new Michael Connelly noveI.  But I feel the need to do something special -it's our 35th anniversary, and that seems worthy of more than the usual gift, or even of dinner and a movie.  At this point in our relationship, we tend to celebrate with experieces, rather than with objects.  After all, when you've been married this long, what more "stuff" do you really need? (My husband would qualify that by saying, "only if the stuff in mind has four very large tires and an even larger engine.")

I was thinking about a concert - I could get tickets to any number of events coming up.  American Idols Tickets, Dancing With The Stars Tickets, Cirque Du Soleil Tickets,  Zac Brown Band Tickets, even some Britney Spears Tickets.   All advertised on line and easy to get - not necessarily cheap, but easy.

But there's something I'm always wanting to do on our anniversary, and for one reason or another we never have the chance.  We were married in a small chapel in the middle of Greenfield Village, a park of historic homes founded by the Ford family.  In fact, the Martha Mary Chapel inside the village was built in the early 1900's by Henry Ford, and named in honor of his mother and mother in law.  Anyway, I always think it would be so romantic to go back there on our anniversary date, and go inside the chapel right at noon, the time of our wedding, and then go have lunch in the Dearborn Inn down the street where we held our reception.

In 35 years, we've never once done that.

I think it's about time we did.