Memories

National Novel Writing Month (Nano) Report (as of 22 Nov 21)

I expect to surpass 37,000 words today. That keeps me on track to finish up 50,000 one week from tomorrow, on November 30th.

I thought the project I chose was going to be easy. Answering 127 questions about my past and myself has taken more time than I expected. I laughed at questions about my favorite hairdo and making a dinner party menu. Yes, I did that, but we called them haircuts (like crewcut) not hairdos, even though they were.

Memories are not forever. Sometimes there’s not much to say. Often, I must ask questions. Like yesterday, I had to ask Yolonda the name of the drive-in burger place where we met. She sent me an article about it closing in the 1970s.

Research can be fun, but to write enough words each day, I must answer four or five questions with four to five hundred words each. And each question is different and unpredictable.

As I enter my fourth week of this self-inflicted Nano challenge, I feel like I will not do it again. It’s a lot. However, I’ve managed to keep up with everything else.

In addition to writing for Nano, I’ve posted at least two poems and one essay each week. On the 8th, I accepted a challenge to write a short prose piece on dVerse, a poetry writing webpage. The problem there was making time to read and respond to 40-plus other bloggers.

I’ve also written three micro-fiction stories for the Friday Fictioneers challenge (30-ish to read and respond to), with one more to do before Nano ends next week.

The weekend of November 5th through the 7th, we drove to west Texas to visit with Julie and her bunch for grandson’s last football game of the season and his 16th birthday.

(Christian Ashby #74, Colorado City, TX Wolves.) When you find yourself the varsity center and defensive nose-guard on your high school football team as a sophomore.

I’ve also managed to complete several home honey-do and self-assigned projects. I’ve been shopping several times and there is more to do this week in preparation for our family’s Thanksgiving on Saturday.

Except for three or four days, I exercised every day by walking or swimming. I’ve been reading as much as I can (finally completed Papa Hemingway) and trying to figure out what to read next.

I tried doing my Saturday morning writers group zoom meetings. That hasn’t worked well. I’ve had to leave early on two occasions because I couldn’t concentrate (needed to be writing for Nano), and I’ve passed on two others. And now I’ve done this report.

Have a good and thankful week.

Bill

 

Thursday Rune (Kip)

Temporary Friendships

I never understood him.
He told me things,
as others have,
where truth
may have been shaved,
distorted, or it was not
exactly as it was.

He was my roommate,
at times a friend,
but solid ground
did not bridge us
for very long after
I went one way,
he another.

Many silent years later,
Yolonda found Kip.
Living in Florida,
where he has since died.

It’s hard to say
what matters,
so many years later.
I wonder what
I saw then, that
I cannot recall now.

Look both ways but mind the gaps.
Hold on to dreams and memories. But sometimes,
I wish I knew then what I now know. At other times,
I wish we didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

Sammi’s Weekender #235 (mirror)

Click for Sammi’s blog and links to other blogs for prose and poems.

Timeless Reflections

For twenty-seven thousand days and nights
what you have seen is not all that ever was.
You see in me today’s truth, one perpetual now.

With one look I never judged anyone.
I reflected an eternal present
without darkness, forgiving the past,
each glimmer gone, days and nights
numbered and stacked
upon your tired shoulders.

Like ashes from wood burned
in past fires, days forgotten, names confused,
adjusted appearances, time
carefully dealt from fate’s shuffled deck,
one at a time until there was none.
Lines of life get clearer, youth
forgotten there, inside grandfather’s mirror.

Mirrors can’t look both ways.
The reflection they cast is only today.
Mind the gaps and fix the cracks, everyone has history.

This mirror hung in my grandfather’s house 100 years ago, then in our dining room from before the day I was born. Click on the photo to read Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mirror.”

Sammi’s Weekender #229 (caboodle)

Click to find Sammi.

It’s All Just Stuff

Measure married history
with social mobility
and acquired caboodle from:

Abilene to Ankara, Turkey,
then back with bounty
to College Station.
Then Woodville.
Then Abilene again,
and on to Del Rio.

Sacramento before
Fort Worth,
then to Guam
for booty from China Pete’s,
Korea, and South Pacific trips.
Back to SAC,
then to San Antonio.

Edmund, Oklahoma,
and Albany, Texas preceded
San Antonio’s redux.

Florida came before Seattle.
Finally,
Georgetown with another
van of encumbrances.
Stuff.
And memories….

Look both ways for what was and will be.
Count blessings, mind gaps, and cherish memories.
Measure happiness and adventure carefully.

 

Sammi’s Weekender #226 (yard)

Click graphic for Sammi’s Blog

My Fantasy

Like old, faded white, torn, photographs
faces with names I forget, family
I never met. Dead people still
physically and mentally part me.
Memories. Pulpy puzzles without pieces.

Forgotten years of backyard child’s play
where I fell for the girl next door,
Tootie, older than I at three or five,
my first fetish. Desires I never
understood or confessed till now.

Grass, dirt, fences, porches,
clothes drying, neighbors.
My first snowman.
I remember her name,
how I felt, nothing else.
No Tootie photo.

Look both ways.
The past equals no future.
Mind the gaps and fill them with memories of whom.

 

Sammi’s Weekender #219 (vivid)

Click on graphic for Sammi’s blog page.

Vivid Memories

That first romantic kiss.
Nights in the wilderness
sitting by a warm campfire.
A mother’s smile, a daughter’s laugh,
the soft whispering voice of a lover.
Our child’s birth, your son’s success.
The smell of a grandmother’s hug.
That first buzz, never found again.
The gift of a young pet. The sadness
and loneliness of a beloved’s death.

Muffled lonely sounds
on cold snowy nights. My first bike.
A thing well done. Disappointment
overcome and rewarded. A road
less travelled. A baby’s accidental
soft touch. Moments in a lifetime.

Look both ways,
to the future for the young,
to the past for the old.
Mind the gaps but live in today with hope and happiness.

Poetry: Sammi’s Weekender #175 (megalith)

 

Megalithic monuments to our past.
Cold stone can’t heal broken hearts,
replace shattered dreams, give life
to memories of the dead.

When will truth
replace our human greed, when
will we ever learn? We see and hear
what we want
with blind eyes and deaf ears.

Why even ask?

Look both ways for life.
Mind gaps in memories, lest we lose what we have.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial with the Washington Monument Washington, D.C.

Sammi’s Weekender #156: home

It’s more than just a place
more than just some people,
more than loving others,
or being loved by them.

It’s more than all my memories,
more than sights or sounds,
more than tastes or smells,
more than what I’ve found.

Is home more than where my heart is?
Or where I hang my hat?
Is that where home is really at?

Is it true, as they say,
it’s not where I should stay,
never shall I pass that way again?

Maybe so, maybe not,
maybe home’s a feeling,
I felt somehow once before,
something just like that.

Like when I thought I knew the score.
Home, the best place
I’ve ever been before.

Look both ways if home is where ya stays.
Mind the gaps in floors for traps, never can we go back.

Sammi’s Weekender #151: Keepsake

It says,
“Sambo.Richards, Duck Pond, PA”
(northeast of Scranton)
on a keepsake;
a dog tag probably,
all the d’s are backwards.
It was my mother’s,
and I have others. Some
were my grandfather’s
who was quite the handyman.
I never knew Sambo,
nor my grandfather.
But I knew Mom.

Looking both ways,
keepsakes are memories,
sometimes not our own.
Mind the gaps. History is there.