Hitting the wall of writer's block, meals, stories on the radio, selling art on the street, & work as a bakery clerk...

Hitting the wall of writer's block, meals, stories on the radio, selling art on the street, & work as a bakery clerk...
11/14/11 3:24p

She was starting her writing so late today. The morning had been spent preparing for and teaching her adult art class at the library. Since she was going through such ambivalence over the writing work, she knew the day before already that she would not be able to bring herself to work on it before class as she had the previous week. She knew there would be time to do it in the afternoon. Whether she would go to the Nano 'write-in' session at the library she had not yet decided. She thought she probably would not. She wanted to be able to do the necessary house cleaning in anticipation of the students who would be coming the next day. At least she knew she would give the writing another day.

It had come to her in the morning that she'd felt so depressed with her disappointment about the writing because she believed she had to give up the project, having determined it was foolish and wasting time. This morning she realized she did not have to give it up even though it might be foolish and a waste of time. It had been so good to have this project that could be tackled on such a daily basis.

She had told her mother what she was going through with it. Her mother described how she used to marvel at her own mother and father's ability to sit down at the typewriter and quickly write out full page letters to whomever they owed correspondence to. That mother could write about the most ordinary events of a day and make them sound fascinating.

She would try to remember more of the minutiae of a day and tell about it, if she had nothing else to write about. One could not just make it 'sound interesting'. One had to find what was interesting about it.

Breakfast was becoming quite a different routine because her usual staples had run out. She wanted to go shopping but was unsure about the state of the car's brakes and had not taken the time to make arrangements to have the problem looked at, or even to stop to ask someone who might know, whether the problem could have been caused by the recent tire repair, and could it be driven if the pedal was going down to a certain level that felt lower than usual.
She'd had to have instant coffee instead of ground coffee. On the rare times she had instant coffee she used the powdered creamer. Her strongest associations with this kind of coffee were of community gatherings. To taste that kind of coffee brought back associations of being at a community gathering.

She also used to have this kind of coffee so many years ago when she did painting and drawing at a fishing village waterfront dock. The little store there had such coffee available for everyone. She would fix herself a coffee and go out to draw the boats of the working waterfront. Sometimes she would do watercolors and oil paintings of boats by request.

Her main breakfast meal had been canned kidney beans mashed with ranch salad dressing and served as a spread on rye crisp crackers. They were called 'kneckerbrot' in German - loosely translated as crackerbread. She could remember this from her childhood, as her mother would often get it. They would eat it with thick butter and coldcuts, or cottage cheese with fresh chives sprinkled on top. Now she herself often kept it on hand for the times when she had run out of other things.

4:01p
She was tiring again. She felt what she was writing was too boring. It was practically putting her to sleep. she was still writing without being willing to write what she would normally write if she were doing her journal by hand. She wanted so much to put her head down and fall asleep. She was down to typing with one hand so that she could rest her head in the other hand. How was she going to make it through?

Would it hurt to have a look at how much she had done, to see how much she still had to do for the day?
4:06p 724 words
4:41p she was still crashing and practically napping all this time. Her head would fall forward when it lost its balance as she slipped off into a temporary sleeping state, dreaming of kneckerbrodt.
4:43 - she would have to take a break.

6:07 p resume
Supper was a large red potato sliced and sauteed in olive oil. This she had sprinkled with parmesan cheese and a touch of vinegar. Meanwhile she sauteed frozen whole greenbeans til browned and soft. She had added these to the cooked potatoes and sprinkled more grated cheese over the dish. Finally she tossed it all with cesar salad dressing. She found it very tasty. Perhaps now she could think of more to write about. She could at least tell about the dinner.

The radio was telling a story about a former German financier who, upon losing his job, had decided he would go into the mobile fast food business. He had bought a converted van and did the research on what it would cost to make and sell sausages from this van outfitted to cook and serve on the streets. He was now selling this food outside the building he used to work in. People lined up to buy his specialty food for their lunch. His children were upset at first that he was doing work that seemed such a step down from his previous work and role in life. He told how he'd had to tell them it was not the money one made in life that mattered, but how satisfied one was with what one did.

Hearing this story she felt nostalgic for those times years ago when she used to take her little cart laden with her greeting cards and notecards, and sell them on the streets of New York City. She had been sporadic about this work as sometimes she would do some freelance officework which would often last months at a time. When she had first started out with it, she was making handpainted cards. They were artwork done on large cards rather than any subject matter one would expect for a greeting card. No Happy Birthday or Congratulations. These had been quickly drawn brush and ink drawings of angelic faces, cats, and horses. Those were the subjects she could draw easily enough to turn out in a spontaneous manner that would also be completed quickly. She still had a few of these first experiments in the business of card making. She had stopped doing them once she realized she was selling them for too low a price for how lovely she thought they were. She felt they should not be sold at that low a price. She wondered what would have happened had she gone on making and selling art in that form.

Several years before that she had tried making up some miniature landscape paintings to sell in the streets of New York City. They were made for the purpose of selling, rather than as something she had simply decided she wanted to make. She would lay these out on the sidewalk on a colored cloth, or hang them on a little board display. She tried various locations throughout the city. She may even have tried going into a few businesses to try to sell them directly to people.

One place she went to sell these at was outside a bakery in Greenwich Village. This had been a place she liked to get herself a special treat every once in a while. She had long ago forgotten what that treat was. There had been a fellow set up with a large array of framed artworks outside this bakery. He mostly sold the artworks as prints rolled up in tubes. He did this on weekends. She had become friendly with him and learned a bit about his business. He was a photographer and also sold his own photographs in this manner. He introduced her to one of the bakery owners. He gave her advise making a poster for her display and gave her permission to sell outside the bakery.

She had forgotten how much later it was when she was walking in another part of the city and came upon another outlet of the bakery. She went in for that favorite treat. The store had just opened. The same owner was there and greeted her. Did she want a job? She went to work within the next few days. There had been plenty of troubles with some of her coworkers. One was an old school retail food clerk. The rest were young people, some of whom were immigrants who could barely speak English. The old school retail clerk always seemed to snap up all the sales. The clerks had separate sales drawers in the cash register. This was either so the boss could tell which clerk made the most sales, or to keep each clerk responsible for their own sales errors. Life was often miserable working in that store with that clerk who so often pushed to grab all the sales.

Soon she was able to transfer to that bakery in the Village. This was much more to her liking. She made friends there. One of these coworkers was still her friend 35 years later. They had had the privilege of waiting tables in the cafe at the back of the bakery. She had worked six years at this bakery. It had been here that she'd started trying to sell those 'art' cards. She would offer to show them to her customers in the cafe and sell them on occasion in this way. When she finally left that job she had gone taken this art to the streets again.

This summer she had received an inquiry from someone who had bought one of those first little landscapes from her. The person told her that she had come into the workplace and shown her paintings. This person still had that little painting and had sent a photo of it to show her. She could remember the painting and could dimly remember going into that business to try to sell her little paintings. However at the time the inquiry came through, she had been too preoccupied with other projects to be able to return the communication. She needed to follow up on this. She had found it so touching to have this person and the forgotten painting of long ago reappear.

There were other instances where her artworks reappeared in her life.

7:12p 2522 words Hah!!!