Blogs, Vlogs and Workaday Creativity

By Tagged , 1 Comment

Within the last several months I have become…how shall I put this…a follower of several mild online sensations. Bloggers and vloggers. Not bloggers of the class to which I belong. I write for family and friends because I like to write and like to read what I write, and I know that sometimes they do too.

The people I’m talking about are different, and besides often enjoying what they create, I’ve become fascinated by the fact of their existence. They sit in their houses and apartments and bedrooms all day writing and editing and drawing and tweaking and filming and trying. Then they click a button that says “Upload” or “Submit” or “Publish” and what they have sometimes spent hours making zooms out to meet an audience which hovers somewhere between fanbase and friend group. They are really the maker’s people, his race of Joseph. These people spend five minutes watching, twenty minutes commenting, liking, responding and re-enjoying, then they go back to their own lives with a smile on their face and a nice, new thought in their head. Until next time.

It’s a really unique relationship, I think. By no means an ideal, but there’s something wonderfully affectionate about such an interaction. The audience knows nearly everything worth knowing about their friend. They know his birthday, the names of every person in his family, the layout of his entire home (because often they’ve seen it themselves), his most minute fears, every expression he makes, and entire story of the time his dog threw up on the carpet. They know this because he has opened the doors of his life and let the internet stream in; he is sharing his humanity with the world, in the most entertaining way possible, in case anyone cares to hear. His people love him for it. A few clicks of a mouse, and there is that familiar face of a friend doing their darndest to make your day.

The creators themselves, on the other hand, know very few of their people personally. They read comments, they answer emails, they take suggestions, they give hugs, pose for pictures, and are delighted to be shown around hometowns. Yet they know that there is really only one way to reciprocate the friendship so lavishly offered in nearly every comment. They have to keep creating. They have a responsibility to all these priceless souls with silly user names to continue to throw open their doors every day or every week and find something funny or thoughtful or weird to present to their people like it’s show and tell all over again.

I admire these people for their commitment to creativity. It must wear them out to be so funny and likable habitually, to concentrate their whole self into a blog post or video on a regular basis, to meet such a demand and be a friend to so many. Regular, responsible creativity  is a frightening thing to me, as well it should be. It is one of the reasons I don’t want to “grow up to be a writer.” I would have to dig and strive to do something I loved at a time I didn’t feel like it, and in a manner I wasn’t comfortable with.

BUT. Inspired by the workaday creativity of these familiar faces, I’m challenging myself. Not hugely, because I’m a student who needs to keep up her GPA, but a little.  Starting now, I’m going to post a coherent, well thought-out  post once a week until the end of the calendar year. (After which I’ll reassess and all that…) Okay?

Now, I’d like to introduce you to some friends of mine: the Green brothers, Allie, Charlie McDonnell, and the Loerkes. Or maybe you’ve already met?

Read This One

By Tagged , , , , 2 Comments

This semester I’ve gotten involved in a Beth Moore Bible study at Heidi’s house. It’s led by her mom and her mom’s friend, and consists mostly of senior girls, with the addition of Laura and Heidi and me. Last Thursday, when we were sharing prayer requests at the first meeting I mentioned my kind of frustrated relationship with everyone back home, particularly my family. In the scheme of things I thought it wasn’t a huge deal, or I wouldn’t have shared it with a bunch of nearly-strangers. But then, almost before I noticed, I started crying, which was not supposed to happen. Everyone looked at me so sympathetically, and hugged me so long, and I got back to campus that night in a foul mood.

This past week I did the five days in the workbook, and was occasionally a little frustrated by Beth’s questions. No, I could not imagine what Jesus’s face might have looked like when he delivered a particular line, or how John might have felt witnessing his first miracle. I knew that Jesus did and Jesus said and that John was there too. Wasn’t that the important part? I also withdrew from a class, which was something my parents didn’t want.

Last night, at our second meeting, what all the other girls said they had appreciated most about that week were the very questions which had frustrated me. I kept my mouth shut. The video teaching for the evening had a lot to do with finding your calling, and the girls, most of whom are student teaching, and already have one foot out in the real world, shared that it meant a lot to them. This was something I’d never struggled with. I always know what I want.

When we prayed, I put my head down on my knees, and told God in no uncertain terms, “I do not like this. I do not like being different. Sometimes at this school, I feel as if I’m the only volatile one, the only one whose sin is motivated by rebellion rather than fear. I am not a fixer or a people pleaser.  While they’re all nodding understandingly at each other’s struggles with insecurity, here I am I am digging my heels deeper into the tar, and crossing my arms, knowing nothing will move me unless I want it to. But if I tried to tell someone, I’d cry again, and it would be embarrassing.”

Then we went home. As we got out of the car, one of the girls whom Laura and I had been riding with, Anne, attached herself to my arm, and told me she wanted to get to know me better. We should go to Warriors together. And so we did. (I’m so glad.)

I don’t remember any of the songs, although I think I sang all of them. I do know, though, that probably for the very first time I admitted something to myself that probably most of you already knew. I have walked though life being a quitter and not a joiner, and I have always said that it’s because I don’t have anything to prove to anybody. But that’s not true. I have a lot to prove–and almost everything I do is motivated by it. I went running at six-thirty this morning to prove to my parents that I am growing up; I dress up every Friday, not only because I love good clothes, but to prove to the world that I am beautiful; I started this blog to prove that I can write; I so rarely talk to boys to prove…well, I haven’t figured that one out yet, but there’s some sort of insecurity there–obviously.

I really, really want people to like me and be proud to know me. I’m deliciously insecure. It’s when I figured that out that I started to smile. Because if I admit I am weak, I can accept help. I don’t have to be stubborn. FOR ONCE, I CAN ACTUALLY TRY! What a relief…

I will continue to go running (with my little lungs protesting at every step), not for my health and not because I think anything I do or don’t do will ever make my parents love me more or less, but because I like to make them proud. And I wouldn’t care if my dad came all the darn way up here just to take a picture. I will dress up with relish every Friday and continue to blog, because I don’t care who knows that I have good taste in words or clothes, and they’re welcome to watch as that taste improves. And boys? I’m just not going to worry about that.

I didn’t know giving into God would be this easy. I’d been resisting this change of heart for years, and bracing myself for His painful sanctification, but it felt like opening my eyes–and that’s all. I didn’t just feel clean, I felt free.

At this point, (I bet you had I forgotten that I was at Warriors while all this was going on. Don’t worry–I had too.) Anne leaned over, grabbed my arm, and whispered that God was going to heal my relationship with my parents. She was sure of it. Funny thing–I was sure of it too. Because that’s what God does. He heals. I may have cried a little, but mostly I felt like dancing. I was not peaceful, but exhilarated. I think I bounced a lot.

So here’s the point: God is good. I mean He is not just kind and loving, but He is righteous. He is good. The other thing: He is faithful. It’s been a long few months, but here he has been.

The only thing I do remember from last night at Warriors is one of the passages they read.

Ezekiel 36:22-28: Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: “I do not do this for your sake, O house of Israel, but for My holy name’s sake, which you have profaned among the nations wherever you went. And I will sanctify My great name, which has been profaned among the nations, which you have profaned in their midst; and the nations shall know that I am the LORD,” says the Lord GOD, “when I am hallowed in you before their eyes.  For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.  I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them.  Then you shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; you shall be My people, and I will be your God.

Beth Moore, I know how Israel felt, and what God’s face looked like, because that is my story, and the promise is for me. It wasn’t what I was expecting. It never is, thank God. Really. THANK GOD!

A Sunday Morning Sidewalk Entry

By Tagged , , , 1 Comment

I had a blog entry all outlined the other day, but then I didn’t have time to write it, and now, looking at what I’d written, I don’t really understand the flow of it. So…scrap that.

I’m back at Grove City, which is a relief. Sometimes I like myself better here, you know? I like the girl who reads for Storytime and takes late-night walks better than the girl who snaps at her family, and tells her best friends she just doesn’t feel like hanging out–it’s too much effort. Not that I don’t have my screwy problems here occasionally, like bursting into unexpected tears in front of a Bible study group I’ve just met, and taking too many Tuesday-Thursday classes, but overall, I’m better here.

I write to you from my room—MEP 119. Liesel and I needed a little table to go between our beds, so, a week ago Friday, when we went to Salvation Army, we bought one for $4. We were carrying it back down Main Street when a nice man pulled over and offered to take it for us. When we got home, fifteen or twenty minutes later, it was standing sedately on it spindly little legs in the mulch by the PLC. It looked great. And it looks great between our beds too, as do the teapots that cover the walls, and Dr. Jewell in his place of honor. Sometimes college is priceless.

*                     *                             *

Just now, I got back from church. I go in the evenings here, to a place called Grace Anglican, attended by a huge sector of the Grove City English Department. Seriously, I think I counted four or five of my professors there tonight.

I love this place because of the way the liturgy constantly drags me into the presence of God with wonderful collects like “Almighty and everlasting God, who is always more ready to hear than we to pray, and disposed to give more than either we desire or deserve; pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord. Amen.” The sermon tonight was about God’s righteous judgment, but it ended (as every good story does) with redemption, and the ever-new proclamation that Jesus died for you and for me that we may “live by faith” and be counted as righteous.

Also during communion we sang “Jesus Paid it All.”

Lord, now indeed I find thy power and thine alone,

Can change the leper’s spots and melt the heart of stone.

My heart of stone is showing signs of life again. Like coming home for good.

Being a Writer

By Tagged , , , 3 Comments

Recently it has been brought to my attention that some persons of my acquaintance are under the impression that I intend to grow up and earn my living as a writer.  (Wow. That’s what they call “one gadawful” sentence. I solemnly swear never to write it again.) If what one means by “writer” is someone who pokes insistently at ideas and stories and words and phrases till they learn to do his bidding, then I suppose I already am one. If, however, one means someone who has a desk and a computer and an agent and a publisher, who lives off of royalties and, with shining eyes, tells interviewers that this is all he ever wanted to do, then I will never be that. At this point, I would only strive to get published to earn the pleasure of writing an acknowledgements page. Let me tell you about it.

Here is an exact transcript of my very first story, written at about age five and magnanimously typed by one of my parents:

Casha and Hantum

By Alice Hodgkins

I

Casha was walking on the street and she saw…a handsome young man. And he looked at Casha. Then, when the cars went, he walked across the street.

II

“What is your name?” he said.

“Casha.”

“My name is Hantum.”

“Hi, Hantum. Can you come in my vehicle to my house?”

“Yes, I can.”

III

“Into the car.” said Casha

“Here we are! Let’s go to a dance.” said Hantum.

“I agree,” said Casha.

IV

When they came home, Hantum said “I love you, Casha.”

“I do too.” said Casha. And they got married.

The End

You can see that even then I had talent. Such grasp of plot—the conflict of the moving cars solved by mere, raw patience. Such intriguing characterization—Casha’s mobster sensibilities and ardent self-love. Such mastery of symbolism—glorification of those virtuous descriptors, Casual and Handsome.

I don’t remember writing much more than that as a young kid besides a romantic farcical drama called “Cambino and Calabria,” and another slighty trippy work entitled “The Baby,” but by eighth grade I considered stories appropriate Christmas presents for my friends. As I remember, Sarah Tate got one about a Dodo bird. Sorry, Sarah. That year I also wrote a short story which I originally named “Nanny Arp,” but in ninth grade I retitled it “How Nanny Went on Holiday and What Came of it,” and sent it into a contest for high-schoolers at nearby Salem College. I won first prize. They published it in their literary magazine, and gave me a certificate, $100, a t-shirt, and a lifetime supply of admissions mailings. The News and Record interviewed me and wrote a human interest article. Fred Chappell, the poet laureate of North Carolina and a friend of my parents’ sent me a congratulatory post card with a cow on it, which hung on my wall till I took it down two weeks ago to repaint. It was so great.

On a contest-high, I found something called The Tweener Time International Chapter Book Contest. High-schoolers writing for tweeners. Hooray! I entered it both freshman and sophomore year. My first entry was called The Everyday Kind of Magic, and was a very free retelling of Hansel and Gretel, involving a sandbox. I wrote it while going through a phase when I capitalized all Truly Important words, but every chapter was lovingly titled and epigraphed. It made it to the semi-finals, and I’m still quite fond it.

It was at about this point, that I bought myself a 2008 Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market. It still sits on my shelf, but I’ve become very good at forgetting its existence. Besides, I only have one rejection letter to show for my pains.

My second submission to Tweener Time was called The Society for the Previously Lost. I may rework it sometime just because the title’s so darn good. My favorite scene involves a little street girl drowning in a mountain of flour, and being rescued by a formerly whiny no-good named Leland who carries her nearly lifeless body home across half the kingdom. The chapter is called “Of Dungeons, Towers, and Peril.” I bet you wish you had written it. In any case, this one didn’t advance past the first round and I decided I didn’t need any more extra-large t-shirts proclaiming “I Wrote a Book for Tweener Time International Chapter Book Competition.”

But junior year I took creative writing as an elective. Because I was already so used to writing novellas I wrote a third entitled Jenny at Theodore House. It was a very sixteen-year-old sort of story, but it had some nice passages, and the house was truly magnificent. I love houses.

When I write stories, you see, I write not what I know but what I want. I look back on all the shabby notebooks containing plans and half-plans for stories and find multiple family-trees, maps and floorplans. The Ptomeys, Ingotville, the Kimbles, the Hardisons,  Ecnelis, the Bonglers, Earickson School, and the Macreadys. It doesn’t just take a village to raise a child. It takes a village to do anything of worth. I think back to my high school writing efforts and I remember the hundreds of times teachers turned a blind eye when I wrote during class, the insistence with which Brittany demanded to read every story though she never liked any of them, the eagerness with which Tim marked up each of my sixty-page novellas, the passion with which Hannah asserted that I was her favorite author, the patience with which my sister typed even the stories with the weirdest names, and the care and brilliance with which my parents gave feedback. They all loved that I was writing—friends urged me to “put them in.” Even those who weren’t readers understood the way in which story was a portal to elsewhere, to more, and they wanted to stake their own small claim in its creation.

Late in high school, maybe senior year, I began a new story which included a couple of my more persistent characters, Michael Dies and Happy Eve. I wrote up a few pages of planning which included every detail of the animal population, prepared myself with a little Langston Hughes, and then began.

When Someday Came

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

It was certainly not Miss Prentice’s doing that Michael ever read the poem, so, to be sure, she cannot be blamed for everything that happened. It was not her fault that Lena came to town or that Ernestine spent three days in the marshes, and it certainly wasn’t her fault about Mrs. Herbert’s petunias. The petunias could be traced directly back to Linus, but nobody could be mad at him anyway.

I suppose I shall begin at the beginning or it shall be confusing. This story takes place in the little village of Shepland up in the mountains. Nobody knew for sure why there was a town there at all. All the mountains had to offer were thin air and lots of trees…

Now that’s a story I ought to finish. You see, writing is not the distant pipe dream. Writing, itself, is dreaming.

In Other News

By Tagged , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

I haven’t written in a long time. Sorry about that. There hasn’t been a lack of material, just more of a lack in interest in said material. But I’m gonna muster up some interest, okay? Here goes.

– I got into the Raleigh airport at eleven p.m. and three of my very best friends picked me up and we went to Waffle House, acted obnoxious, and gave the nice waitress a large tip consisting mostly of change.

-My family had a staycation (Hooray, Mom!) which included a visit to Blandwood  Mansion (which I didn’t know existed), a trip to the art museum in Raleigh (where the Rodin was lovely), a voyage to Staunton to see the ASC (The Tempest was wonderful-wonderful), and a drive up to Hanging Rock (where I discovered that sometime in the last ten years I have become a very bad hiker. Awful, actually.)

-I have gone on four runs,  and now own my first-ever sports bra and real running shoes. I have yet to make it a half mile without stopping to die and walk.

-I am addicted to Hulu. Arrested Development, The Glee Project, How I Met Your Mother, Merlin, Project Runway… It really needs to end.

-Last week I had a little Tres Amigas reunion at the lake with Kinsley and Ruth. We watched some weird movies, ate pizza from the grill, and had a mysterious (but casualty-free) accident while tubing. Just like old times.

–Downton Abbey is lovely. Go watch it.

-Mary and I (and Karen [not Hannah]) painted our bedroom, which desparately needed it. I had been subjecting the walls to duct tape for years. It is now ballerina pink and looks like a hotel room. I kind of love it…

-I found out the names of my freshman little sisters, sent them an exuberant email, friended them on facebook, and burnt my fingers making them the best welcome posters ever.

-Everybody got engaged. (And by everybody I mean Beth and Tim, Hannah and Nathan, and Alyssa and John. ) Weddings! Huzzah! In other life-changing news, Emily and Casey will very soon have their new boys home from Ethiopia. Huzzah again!

-Additional highlights of being home have included finally seeing Harry Potter with Abby, making very oily Ravioli with Karen, buying an excellent leather skirt from Goodwill with Hannah, and discovering a diary of a long ago trip to Grandma’s with Mary. Also, that night Hannah, Karen, Patrick and I went to Walmart and put name tags on everything. That was good, too.

On Friday I go back to school. Between now and then I will snap out of myself. I will go see The Help with Annie, I will visit Mrs. Liebmann, I will look up fall fashion and get excited,  I will pack, I will plan, I will smile, I will get of bed the moment I wake up. In a week, I will be hugging so many people so much. It’s gonna feel good.

The Midwest

By Tagged , , , , , 3 Comments

I should not have waited till now to write this entry. I should have written it yesterday, or the day before, or the day before. But I am writing it now, from gate forty-five at the Kansas City Airport, and all I can possibly think about is home. All I can think about is how devastatingly pleased I am that Karen and Hannah and Abby are going to be waiting at the Raleigh airport for me. (For me! So pleased!) But I am determined that, even as I leave the Midwest, I’m going to write to you about it.

On Sunday evening, I drove my grandpa over to Chillicothe so he could remove a catheter for an old friend. Other people bring a bottle of wine as a hostess gift, Grandpa brings his black bag and his kind hands. While he helped Lloyd, I sat in the front room with Doris, who worked for Grandpa for thirty years, and she told me about back when her daughter was “Miss Missoura” and she, herself, almost went to New York City.    We stayed after to visit for a little while. Doris left her walker in the other room and my grandpa, who hunches so that he only comes to my shoulder when to retrieve it. He was delighted by how much fun it was to use, until we pointed out that he had it backward. I’m blessed to be my grandpa’s chauffeur and phone dialer, even if it’s on catheter business. When I walk into Walmart, the greeter, a little man named Stan, stops me to ask if I’m Dr. Howell’s granddaughter. When I say yes, he beams. Everywhere I go I am Doctor and Georgeanna’s granddaughter, Hope’s Alice to those in the know. The name of Howell means something in Brookfield. It means an open door, an open wallet, an open hand. For those in trouble it means a number more reliable in the sheriff’s. It means a freezer full of beef, duct-taped copies of The Hiding Place, and a whole lot of large-print Holy Bibles. For countless people, the name of Howell is all they really know of Jesus. From experience I know that it’s a pretty good sampling.                                                                               It’s different here, you know? In the past two months I’ve had healthy doses of Des Moines, the Twin Cities, Duluth (especially its mall!), a few little towns in the Iron Range, and, of course, north central Missouri. Good old Brookfield. When my grandma announces that we’re going out to a nice restaurant for Sunday Dinner (eaten properly at about one p.m.) she means some place with a big buffet, metal chairs and linoleum. She cooks her vegetables with butter, and is a little baffled by my penchant for olive oil. When I am sent for errands it is not to a Harris Teeter with a sushi counter and olive bar, but a Walmart with a cheese aisle full of Velveeta, where the only salmon comes in cans. The middle-aged women who shop there do not have careful tans and silver jewelry, but sloppy ankles and tired faces. (There is a Redbox, though. Ah, there is a Redbox.) Someone’s always starting a beauty parlor and naming it something like “The Rusty Razor” or “Curl Up and Dye.” Welcome to this place where people live.

Last February I flew up to Grand Rapids, Michigan for a college visit, and here is what I wrote on the plane home:

There are no words for my loathing of the color of Midwestern asphalt in the winter. It is a mixture of the worst of brown, and the worst of grey, ending in a color which could aptly describe the worst of everything. It is the color of hell. On the other hand, when I look down on the Midwest from an airplane my heart swells, because it has its moments in a way North Carolina does not. North Carolina has its blue skies, its mountains, its beaches, its green hills, its talkers, its thinkers, its doers, its dreamers. The Midwest has few of those things. On poor days it has none, but it has plain moments of clear life which no one bothers to cover. There is a boy on my plane, not much older than me, who is going to be a U.S. Marine. His mother and his grandparents saw him off. They all hugged. His mother cried awkwardly, and his grandpa told him to “Keep his eye on the ball.” That was it. Then he left. They left. They love that he’s going, and they hate it. They love him, though, and they want him to do them proud, and come back a better man. They don’t really have those words, but that’s okay, because he knows. There are no waving signs of adoration, no groups of hysterical friends, just a boy with a short haircut who knows what he is about and what he is doing. Sometimes I think what all the North Carolinian talkers and dreamers really are striving for is something these people with their ugly streets have had since birth: grit, plain sense, and an understanding which requires no words.

In one sense I will never be a Midwesterner. I am too much enamored of elegance and education. I care too much about white tablecloths in restaurants and Renaissance poetry. But the Midwest has taught me, even just this summer, some rather important lessons. It has taught me how to use a riding mower, how to clean a pool, how to pull a sticker plant, how to pass a slow bailer on the highway, how to scour a counter, and how to be patient. I have been taught over and over again how to be patient. Patient with slow steps and oft-repeated stories, patient with people and patient with God. I am learning, slowly, to wait. I am learning to live in this in-between space. I am learning to want what Paul has in Philippians 4: 12. “I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.”

On Wednesday evenings, when I went to pick up my grandpa from the prison in Moberly after his bible study, I usually had to sit in the parking lot for a few minutes. On my right was the prison, looking like a gargantuan middle school, wrapped round and round in yards of barbed wire that sparkled in the heat. Immediately on my left, on the other side of the drive, was the flag pole, surrounded by carefully manicured little flower gardens full of some of the most brilliant and lively colors I’ve ever seen. I sat in between, and waited. They’ve got a pretty huge sky out here.

Perspective and Going Running

By Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I have spent the past week at Story Book Lodge up in the Iron Range of Minnesota. It’s a Bible camp my uncle directs which is operated entirely on the strength of donations and prayer. It is a wonderful, wonderful place which is very dear to many people who are very dear to me. And yet, I am (rather emphatically) not a camp person. Of course this was just a family camp, so to relieve my bad mood I could do things like drive down to the mall in Duluth with my cousins and let shopping get me even grumpier, or sit in the foyer outside the gym for an hour and a half, waiting for evening volleyball to finish and getting eaten by very large mosquitos. You know.

The fact is I have not been super-pleasant this week. My cousin Hannah put up with me quite well and made me laugh a lot besides.  But I kept having conversations with my parents about a rather tense issue, and also spent an inordinate amount of time dreading being back at my grandparents’ house by myself for another two weeks. It’s not that every sensible cell in my brain does not know that it’s really a wonderful blessing to be there, one which will only be available to me for a few more years, but more that I tend to get panicked about being so alone with myself all over again. A nasty part of me is pouting and saying, “But didn’t you already pay your dues? You shouldn’t have to do this.” Really, I should want to do this, but I don’t, and someone should knock me upside the head. Suck it up, Alice. Learn to mow the lawn, and be patient about seeing Harry Potter.

On Thursday night I stayed with Hannah while she housesat for friends and after she had fallen asleep I had a white night sitting in a stranger’s kitchen and crying while their dog alternately licked my feet and growled menacingly. I had a long careful think, and decided three things. First, I was going to beg my cousin Joe to come back to Grandma’s with me. Second, I was going to have all my hair chopped off into a super-short bob. And third, I was going to start going running regularly, preferably early in the morning. Brilliant. Life-changing. I called my mom and told her my plans, and she told me to go to sleep, it was two a.m.

When we got back to camp the next day, my mom told me that Joseph wasn’t going to be able to come, and I received dubious reactions to the bob idea. But the running idea stuck, which I was pleased about. Still am, actually. Feel free to laugh, but I want to do this, and I can be just as stubborn about wanting to do something as not wanting to. (At least, that’s the theory. I’ve never actually tested it.)

And then God brought something else. Perspective. I got on facebook for the first time in few days, and found out that my freshman RA, Alyssa, had just had an emergency liver transplant. I know very few of the details. Last time I saw her she was perfectly healthy, but as I write this she is in Dallas at the Baylor University Medical Center. She is able to blink and move her eyebrows to communicate, and soon they’ll take out the respiratory tube. While she recovers, inch by agonizing inch, I will be breathing clean lake breezes and pulling weeds. I really have no right to say anything but “Thank You.”

I love you, Lyss. If you can have major organs replaced at the drop of a hat, I can learn a little patience and trust, huh? God really is good.

Places

By Tagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle begins with the wonderful declaration, “I write to you from the kitchen sink.” Unfortunately, I only write to you from a very crowded backseat in a very crowded car. Someday I’ll find myself a big old kitchen sink, and climb in.

Really, there are lots of places from which I’d love to write you. There are those of the kitchen sink variety, places I suppose any imaginative person could think of: a window seat, a fireside, a roof full of chimneys, a balcony, an attic. Then there are the places particular to me: the freshly clean breezeway at my grandparents’ house that has Charity and me bursting with pride, the old cemetery across the highway, or the dam at the top of the lake, home to Poopsie’s Greatest Achievement and the world’s most delicious breezes.

Finally, there are the dream places, the places which, as of yet, I only love in fantasy. First there is New England. I’ve never been farther north than New York, so a little back sector of my mind is determined to walk cobblestones in Boston. I’ve been to almost every other part of my country, I suppose because New England is not on the way to anywhere (except perhaps Prince Edward Island—now, that’s a place to write from!) and most of the states I’ve been through have been on the way to family and holiday. But if New England is on the way to itself, then I suppose it must be worth seeing. Right, Liesel?

Next is Hay-on-Wye in Wales, the town with the most used bookstores in the world. I think my very first banner on this blog was a picture of the bookshelves which line the streets: Hardbacks, 50 pence and Paperbacks, 30 pence. In other words, heaven. Then, of course, I’ve just finished Wuthering Heights, and it’s such a wonderfully novelish novel. Though I was really quite pleased to see Catherine and Heathcliff fall dead, it made me want to wander the moors, stand in the wind, have my hair properly wuthered, and above all, write.  There is also Venice. Since reading Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord early in high school, I airily disregard all complaints of its stench and dirt, and instead concentrate staunchly on gold lions, arched bridges, and meeting my dear friend Scipio. Actually, my mother told me if I got a full ride to college she would take me, but obviously that didn’t work out. Sorry, Mom. Someday.

The place which trumps all, though, is mine. I am currently in the throes of a mild-to-severe case of house fever. I look them up online and plan paint, and built-in bookshelves, and secret passageways. It must be big and old and storied. It must have wood floors and stairs that creak. It must have its own peculiar smell (but not too peculiar.) Eventually, it must have the perfect bathroom. Round and domed with a huge, claw-foot tub and sunny windows high in the walls. There will be a fireplace and a big, wide towel rack, and piles and piles of books. (I suppose there’ll be a toilet and sink, too, behind a screen somewhere.) Oh, and probably a daybed and lots of large, ticking clocks. And perhaps a chandelier. That’s my bathroom. A Room of My Own.  A room from which to write you.

Story

By Tagged , , , , , 1 Comment

It is nine-thirty on Monday evening, I have just finished reading the first two chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird to my cousin Charity, and I am wide awake, while she is fast asleep. I guess my southern drawl is soporific. Obviously she wasn’t very engaged in Harper Lee, but I’m so glad to have picked it up.

You see, I really want to write this summer—a real story—something with a climax, plot complications, and the sort of happy ending a reader can curl up and fall asleep in. The books I had been trying to make myself read, while worth my time, weren’t doing much for the creative juices. Bleak House, anyone? I cannot possibly write with Dickens on the brain. I can read with animation, I can hate Mrs. Jellyby with a holy passion, I can weep when Jenny’s baby dies, but when I sit down afterwards, I cannot think of a blasted thing to write. I do not have that scope. Instead, over the last couple of weeks I have drawn up the entire imaginary family tree of a clan called the Hardisons—sixty-one members and six generations worth. There are a good number of extra-marital affairs and shady business dealings involved, and I have the bad habit of marrying off third cousins to one another, but it has been great fun. I have worked out everyone’s birth and death date, and maiden name, all of which are neatly outlined in the 150 year timeline taped above my bed. And yet, there is no story screaming to be written. I have simply been joined by sixty-one vaguely interesting little writing companions. And we all lie there in bed late at night with little to say for ourselves.

In any case, while I could never be Dickens, there is a smidgen of hope for Alice as Harper Lee. I do not mean either that I grew up in place like Maycomb, Alabama in the thirties, which I didn’t, or that I could write something as wonderful and successful as To Kill a Mockingbird, which I couldn’t. I simply mean that Atticus Finch? I know him. I could reach out and shake his dry, warm hand, and honestly declare that I was pleased to meet him. The trick of writing characters, at least for me, is that I cannot write the people I actually know, but I must actually know the people I write. (If that makes any sense.)I must know them, at times, better than I know myself.  Yet, before I really know someone, I must see them doing—I must see them performing the action of being themselves. I know Atticus because I have seen him remove his glasses to shoot a mad dog, and remove his jacket to defend an innocent man. Which brings me back to where I begun. I must have happenings and doings; I must have story. I must have eucatastrophe and dyscatastrophe. I must have that which makes the ladies reach for their smelling salts and the gentlemen for their guns.

My little battalion of sixty-one, or perhaps soldiers from an entirely different quarter, must rise, sail onto the page, stake their claim and defend their territory. Go West, young man into the distant regions of the memory and the subconscious, drag the rivers, mine the gold, rake the muck, but return not empty handed! (Please. I really want to write a story.)

Grandmother’s House

By Tagged , , 3 Comments

HI!

Please picture me wondering around an empty house turning off the radios my Grandpa has left on, spreading grass with a large, lethal pitchfork, trying on an extremely classy sixties dress and coat set from my Grandma’s closet, going to battle with a mulberry bush that lives in the middle of the prickliest roses, and discovering the most wonderful photographic evidence of some very early cousin bonding. Kindly remember that I have not yet visited Walmart, and there is still a cow carcass to be removed from the barn. Wish you were here.

Love, Alice

(That was a postcard for you)

Other highlights so far have included having a very business-like game of waving with Cheryl’s twin boys, finding that unless I have the number memorized I am far too slow for the dial telephone, making friends with a sixteen-year-old girl at the library who’s obsessed with anime, finding a really cool cigarette lighter in the yard, walking up to the cemetery on Memorial Day, then slinking away when real mourners came, and making the life-altering decision to give the dog a bath, so that when he gets friendly while I’m weeding I’ll still be able to breathe.

I’m rather lonely—my cousin Charity won’t be here for another week and a half—and am still adjusting to life mostly sans internet and phone reception. There is currently a rather startling red X over the wireless icon at the bottom of my screen, but tonight I’ll drive Grandpa to Moberly for his prison Bible study, sit in the YMCA, and use their Wi-Fi to post this. And I’ll probably watch the season finale of Modern Family, and it will be very therapeutic.

One more thing. I’m making dinner tomorrow night, and in a counterproductive act of utility I convinced my Grandma to give away a good deal of her cookbooks last week. She doesn’t use them—but I would. Ideas? Something simple that would remind me of home.