May 18, 2013
-
Hidden Messages
Saturday morning has arrived with it's ever-changing medley of lawn mowers, street traffic, chain saws and barking dogs. Annie struggles. It says in her contract that we should be alerted to the menacing arrival of the Johova's Witness guy peddling Awake! throughout this hell-bound community, but we yell at her whenever she starts barking. He was on our porch!
His hands touched our doorknob!
Cheryl opened the door and thanked him for a free religious tract!!!
"Try not to eat the Witnesses," Cheryl said as he hung her her lunging, barking dog from her hand by the collar.
I wasn't going to eat him, I wanted to lick him, Annie pouted, but the man backed quickly away, out of reach.
"You're right," Cheryl said for not apparent reason to Annie, "that was mean of me." Cheryl seems oddly pleased with herself this morning.
The blooms of the neighbor's honeysuckle bush, which lean affectionately over our fence, are beginning to fade. I was going to show you a photograph of the blooms, but Xanga is refusing to download right now.
Nope. Not doin' it.
I have this collection of 'fiction' pieces (most of them based on my life) which are all 6 pages long or less. Not really essays, not really stories... Not necessarily funny. I keep telling myself I'm going to submit them to various magazines and quarterlies, but I usually just end up writing another one. I would post them on Xanga, but most of the places I have studied for submissions require that any pieces they accept not be published anywhere else first.
So in addition to short pieces and the never-ending novel with no niche, I write blog entries and then sit down and write to myself in my journal.
When Ilah came here she was taking a handful of medications and she was struggling with a number of annoying, inconvenient bodily responses to life. Nancy looked over her medications and their side-effects and said, "Well no wonder she has dry mouth... No wonder she runs to the bathroom so often..." One of the problems we detected was that she would hobble out to the kitchen to 'get some Pepto', and the next day she was taking something else, and it seemed reasonable to Nancy and me that if you took one medication one day, you would have a bodily response the next: Ilah, however, doesn't always remember what she took yesterday, so she was bouncing back and forth between constipation and the utter lack of it. We said, 'stop taking that stuff and let your body settle down'. And Nancy gave her a little book to write down everything she takes each day so she can keep track.
Nancy said, "Cheryl, do you have a little book my mother can use?"
I have boxes of little books. I gave her one.
So fast-forward three or four months. Ilah came to lunch one day and handed me a little slip of paper. "I found this," she said. "I'd like you to put it up somewhere."
I took it. Gazed upon it.
She said, "It was in that little book Nancy gave me to keep track of my meds. She must have put it in there for me to find."
The paper is a blog entry about Riley a little after he came to live with us. It's about a dog staring at a gate and his impressions of what his new human thinks about that. I wrote it. I probably also printed it out and stuck it in a little book. The entry has nothing to do with Ilah or Nancy. Ilah didn't even know which dog it was about, so I suspect she didn't have the vaguest idea why Nancy would leave that particular message for her to find.
Because she didn't.
But Ilah found it, and presumes it has some special meaning (even if it eludes her.) And now she wants it framed and conspicuously hung where we all can see it.
All of that kicks me back about ten years when we self-published Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs and proudly gave everyone we knew a copy and Ilah never remarked on it and finally I asked, "Did you like it?"
She said, "Not really." And then she shrugged. "Did you want me to lie?"
(Well, now that you asked... When I take a piece to my writers group for help working out the kinks--no. When I have just published my very first book, which has been my goal and sole focus of ambition since I was thirteen...yeah, go ahead and lie if you have to.)
So it's not as if she is a fan of my writing (or as if that particular blog entry were a particularly good example of that.)
I am not quite sure what to do with it. I put it in a picture frame, but she doesn't want it in her room. Her suggestion was that I tape it to one of our Alice Lewis prints that hangs in the kitchen. (Something like tacking a grocery list to your Van Gogh.)
Sometimes life is just a series of quirky little mysteries.
