Not the delicious dairy product that makes Thai ice tea so tasty and addictive. Not even living at the middle of the world. Well, kind of about that. It's partially about night and day sharing equally...all year long. I live only a few minutes (latitude-wise) north of the equator and because of that, the sun rises and sets at pretty much the same time every single day. No more early dark cold winters in eastern Washington, but that also means no long, languorous warm summer nights there either.
I suppose it means that I live in two different worlds as well. Six months in South America and six in the States. Just when I'm getting used to one, I shoot off to another. In my early college years, I used to imagine myself to be a true fan of change. I loved demonstrations and political debate, lying across I-5 and hitch-hiking and experimentation. All things new. No measly 50% in those days. But then I met my wife and my future daughter and those percentages changed. Became diluted. Good old selfishness went by the wayside. Ninety...eighty...seventy....sixty....oh God, fifty. And it all dipped way below the equator when our son was born. Filthy little charmer/manipulator that he was/is. So half and half possibly could be a step up in the numbers. Like George W. Bush's second term popularity numbers, mine have been pretty low since becoming a parent. Maybe it's time to let the children go. They are, after all, 46 and 35. I notice I'm biting my fingers as I write this. Can they make it on their own? Who's going to raise the grandchildren? Will they ignore us and say, "Thanks for nothing."? It has always been "fun" being a parent. Even the vomit and losing the big game and midnight calls from worried parents and boyfriends who have no interest at all in soup. But parenting an adult. It's like being only half a parent. As in being introduced as "the wolves who raised me". So if I'm now only half a parent, then what's the other half? I suppose it means being a normal human being again. But having never been a normal human being, how would I know? It's not exactly going back to being a pre-parent. Which was a whole hell of a lot of fun, if I am recalling correctly. But then I currently only have half a brain working. It seems the actual reason for writing this particular peripatetic post is to distract myself from the real task at hand. I will get this current manuscript finished. I will. I will. It's way more than halfway done, much like its author. I feel a need to finish and finish well. I can always re-write and edit and make it more like I want it to be. The manuscript, I mean. Not my life. No re-writes there. Grammatically speaking, I've lived a pretty good one. I wouldn't delete much of it. Well, maybe that one thing, but it wasn't my fault and they can't prove anything. I've certainly had plenty of editors in my life , who have given me advice on how to live it. "Of course, you're always the final judge about whether you want to make these corrections because it is, after all, your life we're talking about." This should sound familiar to other authors. But I have always been a morning writer. Normal mornings. Not half and half mornings. Sun's up at 6:00 a.m. here. Much too early to think about sitting in front of the computer. I need coffee, some generous sitting around time (thank you, Maria Bamford, for that phrase), some decent arguments, a few worker type interruptions and missing Oxford commas before I can expect to do my real work. By that time it's close to noon and I can start thinking/wondering about lunch, which should happen around 2:00 p.m. And then after lunch, which is at, say, 4:00 p.m., there are only a couple of hours of light left in the day. And I need that time for reflection. It's not easy being a not even close to famous author, what with all the hoping and dreaming interrupting the flow of genius, but it's a job somebody's got to do. And just maybe, I'm already halfway there.
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I am in an apartment now because the workers on our house cannot seem to reach the point where we can live/work in harmony together. This apartment is across the street from a Franciscan Nuptial Hall, whatever that means. Not that I have anything against St. Francis, what with his affinity for animals and such. No, it's just that the place seems like a sad anachronism when you take in to account everything that's going on around it. And maybe that's always been the case with the Franciscans; there has always been something potentially distracting going on around them through the centuries. I guess for the purposes of full disclosure I should now report that I am not Catholic, have never been a Catholic, although I once wore a St. Christopher's medal for about a month, and it is not my intention to offend anyone who is or might be thinking of becoming one. I only have two affiliations with the Catholic Church: (1) I once had a roommate who was a convert, who whooped it up on Saturday nights and then quite piously visited the priest sometime the next day. And (2) There was a period of time when I conducted psych evaluations on prospective priest candidates from Latin America because I happened to be able to communicate in Spanish.
Garbage trucks play music here. You can hear the innocent voices of children lifting from afar on a recording that repeats itself twice a minute. Their song implores us all to be ecologically minded and to separate our trash: set out our inorganic materials on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; our organic on the rest of the days of the week. Being able to hear this song from afar gives me plenty of time to hustle around the apartment and collect whatever type of trash is on tap for the day and get it down to the street, tied on a fence up high so the street dogs don't get to it, before the garbagemen arrive to take it to some unnamed, but I'm sure perfectly sanitary location. I like to hear the voices of the garbage choir. But today, for some reason known only to God or to the Department of Sanitation, the Franciscans decided to chant, and not just chant, but chant at the same time that my beloved refuse truck was approaching. I am not opposed to things Gregorian, calendars or otherwise, but I have to tell you, a good old fashioned serious dirge-like chant just does not go well with a garbage-themed children's tune. I tried desperately to make out what the chanting was all about, but sadly failed to decipher even one single word. Perhaps it was a chant about the need to separate other types of garbage and to place it in the hands of some other higher power besides the Sanitation Department. Doris was literally on the fence for a while today. She walked back and forth like a nervous gymnast. When she finally jumped to my side, she stared at me a moment, ruffled her feathers and then ran like the wind. She is basically a white chicken with black painted in the shape of curling fire on her wings. When she takes off, she resembles a roadrunner, head pushed forward, body low to the ground leaving the black on her wings a few seconds behind her. Let me be clear, I have done nothing to this bird, but her emotional antics would sway any jury in a court of law if she ever accused me of even touching her. So, outsmarted by a supposedly dumb animal, I basically let her be.
Insert very strained segue here: Doris reminds me of my current protagonist in the YA novel I am writing. How? In the way she can create her own anguish and then try to blame others for the result. In the way she keeps going back to the same dilemmas. In the way she straddles the fence and observes rather than flying down to one side or the other and dealing with the consequences. In the way she experiments with leaving the safe haven of her home. In the way that it looks like she can take care of herself, but occasionally needs the guidance of the larger flock. See what Doris is doing to me? She makes me all gooey in my insights and philosophical way beyond my capabilities. I want to bond with her, but how? To this little roadrunner/chicken, I am Wile E. Coyote, her constant nemesis who sets traps loaded with TNT. She isn't aware yet that those traps must always backfire on me. She doesn't realize that I can be a source of constant entertainment for her. Some day maybe, but for the time being, she'll eat a few bugs, make a mess out of my new garden, and leave me a perfect oval prize before she leaves for home. I think we'll be hearing a lot about Doris as time goes on. QUESTION FOR THE DAY: In which direction does the toilet flush at the equator? Ah, perspective. I have to say it's lovely to be in South America, high in the Andes, slogging through black flies, Kichwa, new cuisine, old house remodel, and meeting new friends. I have named the chicken in our yard Doris and although she seems deathly afraid of any movement we make and I've yet to figure out how she gets over the high wall separating her home from ours, she faithfully shows up, lays an egg in the middle of nowhere, and then retreats to her own domain. Now there's a decent neighbor. Thanks, Doris. Hopefully I'll have new friends for you to play with before too long.
Perspective today means taking a break from the chaos that is my country, the US of A, and seeing it with different eyes. To watch the way some of us act in someone else's country. Talk about entitlements. Oh boy. But the best part of perspective is to see how alike we all are. People love their children, love their country, love their friends, want what's best, have hopes and dreams, know more than they think they do, believe in a higher power or don't, want the world to still be here when the sun comes up in the morning. As a writer, this is the best possible place I could be. The distractions are not electronic. My distractions now are crowing roosters, lowing cattle, the sound of rain on my red tile roof, a giant spider skittering across my shoes. My mind is open and refreshed, and oh do those story ideas come rushing in. I am hard at work on a new novel, two actually, one for Young Adults and one for Adults. I'll keep you posted. |