Lines

In one of my writing groups, we were given a few pictures to choose from and the task to write a story either based on the character or setting to see which stories were more appealing to the readers.  We were asked to keep the story under 1000 words, and told that it didn't need to be a complete story, a scene was okay.

With that being said, here's the picture I selected followed by my vision of this man.

Photo credits to whoever took this picture. You know who you are.  

Lines – Character/Plot

S.J. Henderson

Lines. Ain’t that the story of my life? Always been standing in one line or the other, my whole blasted life.

Today I’m stuck in the soup line behind the old lady with rollers sticking out of her hair like pussywillows and tufts of cat hair clinging to her pink housecoat. Always bumped into by the guy waving his hands like he’s conducting at Carnegie Hall while talking three octaves too loudly about politician so-and-so to his buddy. Who cares about the crooks in office? I sure don’t. All those suits ever done is send innocent people to their death while they’re busy signing ridiculous bills and screwing some floozy on the side.

It was a handful of them crooks who gave me the lines above my right eye--my sightin’ eye. The one that saw every last second. I’d poke the cursed thing out if I thought I had the balls to do it. But I lost those as soon as I let that kid die.

He couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12, the age of my little cousin, Ben. They’d sent a kid into the stinking paddy with a rifle bigger than he was. And now the kid was a murderer. His big black eyes grew wide as he watched my buddy crumple, dead before he even hit the mud. Ray--that was my buddy’s name. Had a girl he planned to marry if we ever made it back home, and four younger brothers and sisters to help care for after his Dad passed.

The Vietnamese boy, the enemy, turned his rifle from Ray to me. The spot where my heart should have been. Truth be told, my heart stopped beating a long time ago, when I took my first step on this blood-soaked ground.

“Do it,” I said, opening my arms to expose my chest. “I don’t want to live another day in this hellhole.”

The boy blinked. His finger shook on the trigger. I may as well have been recitin’ the ever-loving Constitution, for all the English he knew.

I pointed at my heart, my fingers in an L-shape. A gun. “Bang!”

The tiniest bump at his throat bobbed as he gulped. He doesn’t want to kill me or he’d have done it already. I wish he’d make up his mind already, or at least run off before something worse happened. But he didn’t.

Another soldier, a guy named Lou, came around the corner and his boots slid in the muck. When he spied poor Ray on the ground, and me and the boy in our stand-off, his rifle locked on the boy with a click.

“Wait!” I don’t know who I was talking to, the kid or Lou. All I know was that I didn’t want to see another river of blood or another broken body.

Lou grunted then fired a round. The boy was too slow. His round eyes focused on mine as he fell to his knees, and then facedown into the muck. I didn’t cry for him, or for dead Ray who wouldn’t get to marry his sweetheart or provide for his family.

Instead, I stand in lines. Lines for food. Lines for shelter. Lines for everything because I’m not free to be me.

Well-dressed women with their manicured nails and little yappy dogs shrink to the other side of sidewalk when I scuffle by. Men in business suits with cell phones attached to their ears tell me to get a job as they plink pennies at my feet. Problem is, no one wants to hire a ghost of a man who jumps every time a hammer strikes a nail or hits the dirt when someone drops a load of wood.

The lines will take me, though. I blend in here among the outcasts, the forgotten, the spooks.

Disconnect.

I've been struggling for a while trying to make sense of things. Purpose. Relationships. Life.

Before you get all worked up, nothing's going on. Not even once have I been tempted to buy a convertible or hire an exotic pool boy even though I'm speeding head-long into that age bracket. Observing the lives of those around me reveals those tales usually don't end well. Besides, I don't even own a pool. Details, details.

This post probably won't make a lot of sense, but they rarely do. This blog is about working things out. I see it as a bonus if I write something and it happens to mean something other than random words on a screen.  Of course, I welcome your ideas and feedback if you dare to leave a comment.  Contrary to the title of this blog post, I really do wish to connect with those of you who take the time to read this nonsense.

Back on point.

I spend a lot of time thinking through scenarios, especially when I'm in plotting or writing mode for a novel.  Characters take shape within my mind, and I assign to them a host of flaws and (usually) redeeming qualities.  They act, they react.  They show compassion, they show contempt.  It's an undeniably odd way to spend one's day, creating people and then watching them take over and navigate their triangles, circles, and various other geometric designs.  I do not envy God.

My real life is no less strange than those I craft.  If I were at liberty to share even the roughest outline of my family's past, you probably wouldn't believe most of it.  If I asked for your family's story, complete with cobwebs and skeletons, I'm sure it would be just as sordid.  No one is immune from controversy and conflict.  If we were, we probably wouldn't have many true, close friends.  Stumbling and falling and then picking yourself back up again, especially with the help of others, tends to plant the seeds of empathy.  It allows our ears to remain open and our mouths to stay shut.  It makes us more than just human, it makes us alive.

Sometimes we forget how to put ourselves in the shoes of others. We must not forget.  To forget that others need to connect with us is to forget how to truly live.

My brother stopped by a few days ago.  He and his wife are involved in a network marketing-type endeavor which focuses on self-help and coaching (good things, certainly). One of the recorded talks he listened to applied to me and my writing path, and he asked if he could stop by.  As we sat on my front porch, rocking on my rocking chairs and trying to ignore the mayhem inside the walls of my house, he shook his head.

"I've been trying to let God talk to me in that still, small voice," my brother confessed.  "He usually has to shout at me."  He felt God laid that particular CD on his heart, intended for me, so I could tell him our sister was in the hospital and scheduled for surgery in the coming week.

"What is wrong with our family?"  He asked, voicing a thought that has rolled around in my head frequently.  All I could do was shrug.  If I knew the answer, it would be fixed already.

A minute later, I asked how his step-daughter, a freshman in college, was doing.  

"She's sick.  They have her running... But, anyway, I really wanted you to listen to this CD."

And that was that.  I love my brother.  I'm as guilty of this as he is, or just about anyone else.  We ask to be let in while simultaneously slamming the door.  We disconnect ourselves from others, and for what? I'm sure whatever is on the CD is interesting, possibly even life-changing; however, it cannot rival the genuine sharing of struggle and concern.  A sister struggling with health issues.  A niece burning her candle at both ends trying to figure out a new stage of life.  Someone else enduring the day with a difficult spouse or an unwell child.

I am guilty of this.  The guiltiest, maybe.

And I wonder...  Is God sitting, pen in hand, considering the plot to our story and wondering about story elements--conflict, story arc, resolution? Though He knows the end to our novel, does a twist or turn ever surprise Him?  Does He write our characters together, only to have us change the lines and the scenes into something unrecognizable?

Solitaire

They keep talking about how lonely it is, the life of a writer.  Authors are driven to drink every day, taunted by their own words and the overwhelming quiet of it all.  We're changing that, they say.  Now you can connect with other writers who are on the verge of crazy, too!, they say.  See Twitter, Facebook, Skype, meet-up groups, a million blogs from Joe Schmoes just like you--you get the idea.  There's no reason to slog through this alone when you can share the [sometimes] torturous process with others.  And when the madness strikes all of you, well, at least you're not drinking alone.

This morning I am feeling the isolation.  I'm also confused because I don't know whether I should feel sad or if it is acceptable.  To me, writing is exciting but also weighty.  It's the warmth of sun on my face as well as the dark outline of a thunderhead off in the distance.  This is what I want to do...  But I feel the pressure of it, the frustration from wasted moments while pursuing other things. Or, on the other hand, there is the sadness from looking family in the face and saying, "It's been a long time.  What have you been up to?"  Then there's the agonizing decision of spending an extra hour or two to write in the evening or turning in early because I know I will end up at a birth sooner or later.  Even taking the time to post on this blog seems foolish, a wasting of words, when I should be concentrating on my other works in progress.  What's the payoff to hiding myself away in order to THINK, or sitting alone in a cafe with earbuds and a keyboard (besides the obvious--people-watching and caffeine!).

Balance.  Reality.  What to do, what to do.

I read somewhere that writers shouldn't write in order to be read, to which I agree to a point.  But, really, I can't figure out why someone would spend hour upon hour building a story unless they planned to share it, at some point.  All of this has to be worth it--has to reconnect you to the world in some fashion, or the world slips from your grasp.

It feels egotistical to say, but I need a writing village.  Who's in?

Social Interaction for Dummies

Something strange has happened to me.  I have become content being by myself in social situations.  If I am sitting alone somewhere, staring at the ceiling, please don't feel bad for me.  It's probably the most peace and quiet I've had in days.  In fact, if you come talk to me out of pity because I look lonely, you probably ruined the zen of the moment.  Thanks for that.

Deep inside there is a comedian... I enjoyed him for lunch with some fava beans and a nice chianti.  Just kidding.  But, really, I enjoy making people laugh.  I will beat every ounce of life out of a joke, and then give it one more really good  swat because, heck, I can.  That's my personality, love it or hate it.  Lately, though, I have been more than happy to be a fly on the wall, listening and observing vs. working the crowd.

If I'm being truthful, I've never felt like working the crowd.  I've always entertained others out of necessity and, eventually, force of habit.  When it all boils down to it, I'm much too slow to craft my speech, and I hate how little dexterity there is with the words that come from my lips.  In a perfect world I would want to live life with cue cards with the option of ad-libbing a particularly witty one-liner whenever the opportunity arises.  Maybe I missed my calling--maybe I should have been a sitcom actress.  Even then, I probably would have been cast as the quirky, awkward neighbor or the harried mother screaming at her kids in the middle of the supermarket....  An extra.

I don't want to worry about being myself, socially clumsy as I am, or about giving myself a free pass to get lost in thought when you think I should be doing the limbo or Macarena or something.  I don't mind if you don't mind.   If you mind, well, you've just become the topic of my next cue card.

Drop In the Bucket

Who am I, that You are mindful of me?

Who am I, that You care for me?

Who am I, that You allow my self-absorbed nonsense?

Day upon day upon day.

I am nothing, blank, zero.

And yet, You love me despite my faults.

***

I am feeling it today, the melancholy that visits me from time to time, even though my life is pretty fantastic.  I'm feeling silly, impetuous, and highly imperfect.  I'm thinking of these books I'm writing and chiding myself for considering people will ever give a flying Fig Newton what rattles around in my brain.  I fail as a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, an aunt, a mother, a wife, and as a friend more often than I don't.  I probably need chocolate and a sappy chick flick.

Correction:  I need chocolate and a sappy chick flick.

The realization is that I am a drop in the bucket, a humming that is less than a disturbance in the symphony of life.  Insignificant.  No one cares--I'm not even sure if I care.  God cares, and it shouldn't matter beyond that.  I'll confess, it matters a little beyond that, but it shouldn't.

I'm sorry if I'm less than you expect.  I'm resigning myself to it, this less-ness.  For today, at least.

Imagination

For a while there, I was my own best friend.  Maybe I still am.

My parents split long before my memories could confirm it had ever been any other way. The two sisters I had were four and ten years older; by default I was either too little or too big of a pain to tag along. Surrounded by cornfields and gravel roads, my nearest friends lived over half-an-hour away. I visited them on holidays or saw them at church--playdates were rare, too much stress for my single Mom. Two boys lived next door. They treated me like blood brothers would, rescuing me from one peril (climbing too high up the tree fort tree) and delivering me gleefully into another (swooping bats from the mammoth pine tree in their front yard). And growing up at the tail end of the twentieth century left me with no social network to complain to about it all.

What did I do with all of my free time? I did what any desperate kid would have done in my situation: I used my imagination. Hour upon hour was whiled away in my basement serving never-ending droves of invisible diners who would hover around child-sized card tables at the renowned "Cactus Bay Restaurant". In the creepy-crawly recesses of the back storage closet, I would whip up light-as-air cuisine on my warped burnt orange kitchen set. This was where I first learned to answer phones, a skill I would take with me into adulthood. If only I could say as much for the cooking...

When life as the maitre d' of the Cactus Bay Restaurant became a drudgery, I morphed into a librarian, organizing a family's worth of books in the middle of the basement. It remained, more or less, organized until my parents remodeled a couple years back, undoing all of my hard work and tossing most of the books. At least I hadn't gotten more than five books into the card catalog system I'd dreamed up before deciding I wasn't that bored. Librarians of the world, I salute..... zzzzz.

When it used to dump dozens of inches of the white stuff in Michigan, I'd bundle myself up and run around the yard. My shuffling footprints became paths, and the longer I played, the more places there were to discover. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. "Who's the crazy kid talking to herself over there all by herself?" "Oh, her. Whatever you do, don't make eye contact."

I played with a gaggle of Barbie dolls and the solitary (but insanely lucky) Ken doll. Barbie(s) and Ken fell in love; got in jealous, hair-pulling cat-fights with unsurprising frequency; awkwardly rode their palomino horse, Dallas, even though their rubber-snappy legs weren't really horse-worthy; and went swimming. Of course they went swimming! The only outfit I had for Ken was the shiny purple swim trunks he'd been wearing in the box. Out of pity for perpetually-underdressed Ken, there were an abundance of luaus. That was much easier than, gasp!, buying him a pair of pants. It was nearly the same with My Little Ponies, except they were already horses, so they didn't need to worry about being ill-designed to ride themselves.  Interestingly enough, the ponies were all girls, as far as I could tell, but there were an awful lot of babies within the herd. No one ever explained that one to me, and I'm still wondering.

A family friend gave us an incredible handmade dollhouse that had been his daughter's when she was a young girl. It was the most magical thing I thought I'd ever laid eyes upon, and not a bit of it was made of plastic or blonde hair. There were still hair-pulling cat-fights, but those usually took place after sipping from a teeny mason jar of sweet tea while sitting on the wraparound porch, perusing miniature copies of The New Yorker. You know, like in real life.

During a particularly inventive time in my life, I collected Happy Meal toys. Besides the fact that they were way more awesome back then, I was fresh off my first read-through of The Indian in the Cupboard. In that classic book, the main character, a young boy named Omri, brings a toy Indian (and, eventually, other toys) to life by locking them in a magical cabinet. Well aware that magical toy-incarnating furniture was not easily located within K-Mart, I was hopeful that my cluttered bedroom closet would be the next-best-enchanted thing. At night I would lock up my plastic Miss Piggy figurine and tell myself that maybe in the morning she would be asking me to transform cold, lifeless Kermie, too. Of course, it never happened, and for that I'm probably thankful. A few decades later, I realize that I would have likely soiled myself in fear if I'd managed to bring life to any of the things I locked in that closet.

My extensive stuffed animal collection made up my entourage, headed up by the purple pony I named "Diamond" after a palomino mare Mom attempted to buy and promptly returned after she repeatedly walloped on our poor Tennessee Walker, Jake. Stuffed-animal Diamond managed to escape from a trip to Lost Toyville after she'd had the brilliant idea to hide in a twist of hotel sheets during a Wild West road trip. A nice maid rescued her, and she's been with me ever since. I still wonder how many miles my parents had to backtrack to the previous night's hotel just so I would stop howling.

Somewhere on the outskirts of my posse was my Cricket doll. After dad let me watch the first Chucky movie at the ripe old age of eight, she was banished to a black garbage bag in the corner of the basement. Rest in pieces, scary doll.

Being easily-amused has always had its advantages. I'd like to believe that having to rely so heavily on entertaining myself, especially in those years prior to my own pony, the goodness that was the Nintendo Entertainment System, and pretty much every single bit of technology we have now, I was preparing myself for something much bigger. My thoughts and feelings were solely mine then, not given a lot of chance to find a living, breathing audience. And even though I found a fairly reliable pressure-release valve the first time I put my leg over a horse, I also discovered that I'd taken on another role--counselor. By putting ink to paper, I learned to get it all out, because sometimes that was the only way I knew how. Some of those joys and hurts are still bottled up, others have made their way to the surface. Somehow writing for my therapy, my sanity, also became writing for my enjoyment... and, if you really think about it, maybe the two aren't all that different.

Word.

"...I just wanna throw my phone away

Find out who is really there for me..."

(Part of Me, Katy Perry)