What I’ve Learned So Far

There will be no miracles here.

There will be no particular moment when the trumpet sounds, or when the scales fall from your eyes. You will not win the lottery. You will not wake up richer or more beautiful.

Jenny brushes the hair from Dylan’s eyes. He’s only four, but he has strong ideas about haircuts (No) and about her touching his hair (No!). So she does it when he falls asleep on her lap.

It’s late, and she ought to put him to bed, but she lets him rest with her on the couch for a little while longer. It’s just the two of them, like it always is, and he fell asleep watching Blue’s Clues on DVD, like he always does. But she knows that this “always” won’t last.

She hums a little tune to him as she smoothes his hair with the back of her hand.

We wait for epiphanies that don’t come. We think that someone will walk up to us one day and grant us permission to start living the lives we were always supposed to be living. We wait in vain.

Conor fell asleep in his dorm room with his paperback of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich still clasped in his hand. He had to read it for class, no one was around to talk to, and the roommate was spending the night at the girlfriend’s, so Conor thought he’d start in on the book as a way to fall asleep.

He stayed up to finish it. Before he was done, his eyes were red.

We need no miracles here.

Claude was an old man and he had been married to Doreen for a long time. When his grandchildren asked him, “Gampy, how long have you and Gammy been married?,” he always told them “A long time — but not long enough yet.”

Gammy’s in the bed now, but Claude can’t sleep. Doesn’t want to sleep. He’s slept away enough of his minutes with Doreen. He wants to be awake for the rest of them.

An hour ago, the nurse said, “She won’t need me again,” laid her hand on his arm, and then went out to wait in the hall.

He doesn’t want her to come back. He wants her to come back.

The miracles around us are ongoing.

~

(Photo by Amy Palko, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

Here’s your inspiration:

Go.

~

(Image by Andreina Schoeberlein, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

A couple of things happened over the weekend which, while not so important in themselves, add up to something important for my own modus operandi:

1. My garage achieved a state of un-clutter it hasn’t seen since . . . well, maybe ever in the time we’ve owned this house.
2. The Red Sox, as you may have heard by now, wrapped up the World Series in four games.

Item #1 allowed me to gather up a lot of the draftwork that has been scattered across my files in the garage for lo these many years gone. Item #2 frees up some of my time because I can now stop reading baseball stories every single day. (And yes, the post before this one was about baseball, even though the season is over. What’s your point?) Putting the two together, I now have the chance to work systematically through this draftwork to see how much of it can be salvaged.

Fear not, even now I can hear your questions humming to me over this grand series of tubes we call the Intarweebs!

• How much draftwork are you talking about, Tim? Well, I’m loath to hazard a guess because doing a legit estimate on the number of pages looks suspiciously like work. It may also be like that thing they do in weight clinics with some very heavy people, when they don’t weigh them at first but just get them exercising and eating better. When the problem is as bad as that, you don’t need to put hard numbers on it — you just need to start taking positive steps. But the thumbnail estimate of pages is . . . a few linear feet.
• What, pray tell, are you planning to do with all of that draftwork? The short answer: “subtract”. The longer answer: Go through the whole lot of it, bit by bit, discarding the obvious rubbish and reworking anything that seems like it could turn into a good piece.
• What does this mean for me, your devoted blog reader? Starting sometime soon, you will see a series of posts under the heading “Storytime”. (Look — it’s even in the list of categories in the sidebar! It’s official!) These will be stories developed from this draftwork, or else, you know, off the top of my head, when I can manage that.

Let me emphasize that I am not going to subject you to just any old rantings from my high school- and college-era juvenilia.* To put it another way, I will not simply be keyboarding the essays, stories, and (shudder) poems of bygone years. Rather, I will be taking the ideas from those stories — central themes, plot devices, even just likely-sounding hunks of dialogue — and reworking them into something new and, I hope, interesting.

Since I don’t have so much spare time on my hands these days, many of these pieces are sure to be quite short. (Soem of the longer ones may appear first in serial installments.) Don’t be surprised to see experiments with short forms such as palm-of-the-hand stories and Fibonacci sonnets.

At the same time, though, I want this exercise to be worthwhile to myself as a writer and to all of you as readers. (Listen to my bravado, as though addressing an audience of thousands!) So I’ll be making each peace as good as I can make it in a short timeframe. I’m thinking of these pieces like hard scrimmages, meant to help me get my chops up while cutting down on the ginormous backlog of paper ephemera that now afflicts my files. And, hey, who knows? Maybe this will even increase my fame and fortune!

So, watch this space — and please warm up your typing fingers to give feedback when the time comes.

~

* Yes, there have been writers from Chatterton to Mann who have written mature works of literature at the age of modern college undergraduates. Let me assure you that, at the same age, I did not belong in their literary company.