Breakfast, Philbin's interview on the radio, the turkey drawing class...
11/16/11 10:41a
It was one of her sister's birthday. She would call later.
Breakfast had been another interesting concoction. She had for so many years usually fixed some variation of bread and cheese for breakfast. This had started because she had discovered that coffee could be drunk black if one had something like cheese to counterbalance it. It was the same with wine. This morning she had prepared mixed frozen vegetables steamed in a splash of vinegar and a splash of water. These were then mixed with canned rinsed kidney beans that had been lightly mashed. She dressed the whole mixture with her favorite ranch dressing, 'Paul Newman's Own'. She had a collection of partial take-out packets of these dressings from all the side salads she'd been having at her visits to the local McDonalds.
With her car down again, at least that she believed, she had not been able to get out to McDonalds either. She missed being able to go there where one could sit in the midst of people coming and going about their day, and possibly run into people one knew. Where she lived there were so few places in which to do this. One could go to places where only a certain socio-economic strata of the population would go, but she preferred a broader range of people. She often yearned to be back in New York City for this reason. Ever since moving here she had had the yearning for NYC. That was 19 years ago.
She loved the greater access to nature that she had where she lived now - that it could be right outside her window, and that she could step outside and have much more nature than she'd had in the city. She had always been able to find nature in the city though, so perhaps her assessment of
11:05 a break 11:32 resume
Just now there was a bluejay who had landed on the roof ridge across the way, then down to the branches of the tree next to that house as if it were scoping out something of great interest to it that lay between the two houses. It hopped from branch to branch going a bit lower each time until if finally swooped down past her window level and out of her line of sight. He had perhaps been after a tasty peanut. One of her neighbors set food all around the house for all the animals. The animals often carried away the food and sometimes ended up having to drop it because other animals were trying to steal the morsel.
*Another idea for how she could have fictionalized her journal - write it from the point of view of an animal, either a pet or a wild creature, observing her.
What she had liked about her Dad's writing advice was the idea of creating and compiling a collection of pieces on various topics one knew about. Such a collection could be a good resource. It was a like an artist's 'morgue'. Commercial artists and illustrators used to keep files of images of different subjects and objects. They used these for reference in making their pictures. She had developed quite a morgue over the years through her weekly lessons. She felt she had to keep the subject matter for classes constantly changing and rotating because each student only liked a few subjects. She kept the subjects loosely related to the calendar. She often wished she could get away from subject matter but she believed that would be too big a leap for the students. She felt they had to have some emotional relationship to the subject matter for them to accept the lessons. Perhaps she was underestimating them?
There was something satisfying about working with the calendar. It brought the classes, the art making, into a social communal realm. It made it more of a shared activity - a way that people could join together for a little while yet also be individual. That was what she probably liked best about her teaching work.
12:05 p break - 12:09 resume
She had interrupted her writing to turn on the radio for the news. Just a little interruption like that broke the train of thought. Now she had to think of what else to write about. She had had ideas that morning but had not made notes of these ideas. She would wait for them to pop up again as at the moments she did not care to go digging through notes from the previous days. The radio had certainly been useful the other day when it had triggered something to write about.
Last night there had been a radio interview with Regis Philbin who was about to step down from his long standing talk show. He had wondered a similar thing that she had wondered. Just two weeks after stepping down from his radio job, Andy Rooney had died. To her the connection seemed obvious. Philbin's cohost had pointed out to him on the show when he'd brought up this question, that Rooney had actually said long ago that he would die when (or if?) he left the show. Here Philbin's cohost said that Philbin had never said such a thing, so he should not even consider this would happen to him. Philbin spoke in the interview as if he hoped a different format or venue in the entertainment business would happen for him. Perhaps he needed a new challenge. He also told how so long ago it was a marine colonel who had admonished him that he could pursue anything he wanted and to go out and make it happen - but he had to know that he wanted it. What Philbin had wanted was to be an entertainer on television. He had lacked the confidence or belief that he could be that, until this Colonel had almost chewed him out for not going for what he wanted.
12:28p 996 words
This morning she had woken to the phone's ringing. It had been a young woman asking about getting a painting of her boyfriend's lobsterboat done. Now this needed to be considered. The woman had then immediately left a message about another idea - her boyfriend's lobster buoy design and color combination were unusual - perhaps a painting of that might be more unique she asked.
12:34p break to listen to radio show?
1:12p resume
Another thing that had intrigued her in listening to Philbin, was that he did his show extemporaneously. There was no script. He never knew where things were going, how things would turn out. He walked a tightrope every time he did his show. This too was what he'd wanted.
She had drawn turkeys with the group in kids class the day before. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. There were some new people. Whether she could expect them again she did not know. Sometimes people popped in because they happened to be in the library and/or they had happened to notice the flier. In this case the flier announced the class would be drawing turkeys that day. The kids were now on the lookout for the fliers because she had always played a guessing game with them as to what the day's subject was. They had learned though that the poster on the front door usually gave the topic away. She would have to think of a new guessing game.
She told them they would not be drawing 'hand' turkeys, something she felt was too safe, too known. They seemed disappointed. When they'd struggled through drawing the traditional puffed up turkey and had worked quite awhile at coloring their drawings, she told them they could draw 'hand' turkeys if they wanted. Then she told them she would not be taking photographs of any 'hand' turkeys though, not unless they were done by five year olds. They made quite a variety of turkey drawings. She wondered later whether she should be offering more simple projects like 'hand' drawing. She had seen that even this skill of tracing around one's hand was difficult for some.
1:41p 1357 words
She could not remember what else she wanted to write about. The last stretch of the daily word target could be hard to get through. If she were a talk show host like Regis Philbin what would she do without a script? She often had to do this in her classes before hand if people came early. She would want to be setting up but always felt a responsibility to somehow engage them. One could not just leave people sitting in a room to wait without involving them while one went about one's business in this situation. She could feel their waiting, their restlessness, and it distracted her from being able to focus on setting up what she needed. Sometimes one just had to juggle both though.
There were two things that she used to engage the group immediately. There was the learning of their names, though sometimes she forgot to do that if they had somehow gotten off her usual routine. There was the guessing of the day's subject. With that could also come a brainstorming of possibilities within the subject. As she fielded answers from the kids she wrote them down. The subject had been turkeys. They had all known this. She did not even take guesses from them. Instead she told them to say the day's subject all together when she raised her hands. After that they brainstormed the designs and shapes that could be drawn in the borders of their papers as decoration. One young child usually would not speak in class, but this time raised a hand and said 'Christmas trees'. The kids were thinking too far ahead, but that was the power of Christmas.
Did it matter that this writing was no longer taking just a few hours? She had taken several breaks within the session this time. She believed that she had gone this far into the challenge and gotten through that wall, that she would see it through to its end, even if there would be no real purpose for what she ended up with, and even though she had never been quite comfortable with the voice and namelessness issues. Her Dad had said she could give a name to the subject, just go back to the beginning and do it. She however felt there would be much too much to change. So much of the writing had been an exploration about the very issue of this namelessness and the sound of this voice. Now she wanted to see what became of this situation by the end. She did not know.
2:07p 1790 words
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