Now Playing: Latch (Acoustic version) — Sam Smith

Word Raccoon and I struck a deal today: if she would quit messing around and get ready for the café, I would let her choose our earrings. (As if I had a choice.)

She whined that it was too early, and that she had written on the porch until the lights went on. Past it, even. Wasn’t I happy the novel was getting its due?

Of course, silly raccoon, but also: goals.

Word Raccoon stumbled across this poem in my files and demanded I share it today.

Poetry was with me in Rome then, though neither of us knew it. Images don’t just disappear over the years; they metabolize into Wordsworth’s “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

I wouldn’t say WR is tranquil right now, but is she ever?  

You Know, You’ve Been to Rome

There you were

In the Pantheon

Floating down

Through the oculus

As I sat

In the pew

Being shushed

By the guard

In his useless, unholy

timed efforts

To hush the enthusiasm

Of the pilgrims

ruining my

rumination.

My eyes sought

What yours would’ve:

Both sight and sound.

Rich reds, mysteries

The drone of dozens

Wheeling round and

round.

The intrusive squeaks

of reverse anachronistic sneakers

You would’ve hated that.

The drains in the floor

not doing their job.

I was flooded with longing.

Raphael’s crypt there,

His spirit here, like yours.

Painting the walls

Of my soul.

I’ll see that they

Reserve a nook for you

Like I do.

Purple Prose Alert!!

Anyway, WR told me to tell you she re-read that dramatic scene between Rebecca and Bart I posted the other day and is hooting at how melodramatic it is. She says I should share a real scene instead of that nightmare.

If readers care about us, they’ll appreciate the vulnerability of an early revision or experiment (and that was both…I hadn’t tried that scene in third yet, which is what the rest of Rebecca’s section is in, let alone first. And that Delphi image/vision was a new idea. So chill, WR. Artists have to have room to make false starts or they can’t create. )

If readers don’t care, well, they probably won’t ever like our writing, and it doesn’t really matter. Either way, no one ever died of firsthand (or secondhand) embarrassment.

But if you insist, WR, here’s a more polished scene from another timeline in my novel, (because she will not let it go). James is one of my favorite characters. He becomes the first president of a university in Ohio in the 1930’s.

James’s Scene

James and his father sat on either side of the fireplace in the family’s rented-into-perpetuity farmhouse in Ohio. That is, as long as someone farmed the land, the family was allowed to stay in the house that felt as if it were theirs.

The fireplace was built of bricks formed onsite nearly a hundred years before by James’s grandfather, Harold Whitacre, who had also rented the land and built the farmhouse that would remain theirs only for the duration of their lease.

Today, the fire spread itself in the grate like a sleeping cat, and James found his eyelids shuttering where he sat beside his father in an oak rocking chair whose bottom his grandfather had caned to celebrate James’s birth nearly eighteen years before.

His father gently inserted a walnut into a wooden nutcracker and squeezed it with one hand, making a cracking sound, causing James’s eyes to open. His father placed the nutcracker on the wide-beamed mantle, then picked with one hand at the nut in the other, handing his son half of the meat before placing the rest in his own mouth and tossing the empty shell into the fire.

It occurred to James that so many things humans did to merely survive were violent, even when it didn’t involve living creatures.

James slowed his chair until it stopped rocking.

“Your mother keeps speaking of the young women at church who stare at you during the service. I can’t say I’ve noticed you returning their attention, but she thought it time I speak with you. James, if a man wants to take a wife, not that every man has to, and certainly not as young as you are, but if he does, he has to have some employment.

Now, while you’ve always been as helpful as can be around here, I reckon you don’t have much more natural ability at this than I do, though I can see that you love it. There’s always college for a smart boy like you.”

His father sipped from his mug long past there possibly being anything in it. The pause felt like an embrace to the teen.

“Yes sir. I was thinking that I might enter the academy.”

“Your mother and I thought you might. Everyone knows about your devotion to the church; even when you’re sick you never miss a service. You know more Bible verses, I believe, than our minister does, though you mustn’t tell him I said so. I’m sure our denomination would help sponsor your education. It will require some years of training to become a minister, of course. No one will fault you for that. And then after, it will take more time to settle into a congregation. No, son, there’s no rush at all to start a family. God has made us all different. Some of us he wants to devote more to the things of the church than to our personal lives. If you decide that’s who you are, I want you to know that we will accept that.”

James hung his head. It was true he’d kept his eyes off the young women seated on the opposite side of the church. From early on, his attention had been elsewhere: front and center, staring at the fair-haired minister with the light eyes, the man’s mouth with permanent white around it as if he wore a perpetual milk mustache, a smile that insisted on a return one.

A Word Raccoon’s Morning

Word Raccoon feels better now, because she’s proud of that section. (But is it a bit long?)

Let me tell you the rest of how our morning went.

This morning, she said she would sure be able to write better if I attempted space buns for real. I did a decent (okay, not so much) job but I at least know how to do it now except in my version, a half-inch strand was still hanging down in back, one side was thicker than the other, and let’s not even talk about the part.

Needless to say, I took them down.

I’m going to give it another go over the holiday weekend. (And hey, I’m supposed to be test driving some red, white, and blue nails to review, so why not? The last time I tried a set of nails we went out with friends that evening, and it was not fun with chopsticks for me.)

And don’t get me started on the eyelashes I tried the next week. Not. For. Me.

Anyway, WR chose jigsaw piece earrings this morning, and I pushed her into my van before she could stall again.

Before that, she put on both my flowered kimono and a flowered scarf. One coral based, one pink. Which would work, but it was too much. She glared at me as if daring me to complain, but I played innocent and caught her head turned and pulled the scarf off. She didn’t notice.

Obviously she has never heard of Coco Chanel’s rule about taking off one accessory before leaving the house. (I’m not into fashion rules but some days it just makes sense.)

So, to recap: space buns and possibly 4th of July themed fingernails coming this weekend (God, will I be able to type?), and don’t I have a patriotic duster somewhere? Hahaha…that may be a bit much.

Word Raccoon lowers her sunglasses. “Exactly,” she whispers. “I AM a bit much. You got a problem with that?”

Hmmm…and she tried to blame that purple prose on me. Who believes that for one minute?