Mrs. Fitz's Story Emporium

Grandma Janda was Mom’s Mom and her manicure was her most obvious feminine habit. Her other feminine habits had to do with behaviors, like noticing the shape of people’s heads. She was a head noticer. She would make comments like “Ah. He has a good head.” And, she meant the shape of it, not what was in it.

Her smile was feminine in the shy way some women do: bending her head and looking up at you as if you just said something funny and she was thanking you for saying it.

Her fashion sense was feminine but might have been thwarted by economic hardships. That may be the reason she didn’t have much of it beyond dresses with flowers, aprons with flowers, slippers with flowers and hats with flowers.

But her manicured hands were the hands of one who hires others to work, which she didn’t. Hers kneaded houska bread, typed at sound-barrier speed and played the piano with vigor. How she managed flawless hands finger-tipped in a coral hue is unknown. Once I watched her put lotion on her hands. It was the same way she kneaded bread, powerfully and thoroughly and so feminine.

There are many reason why folks don’t write. Lack of talent isn’t one of them.

Misunderstanding the rules of originality is.

Writers don’t have to worry about originality but some do. No one is you and no one’s voice is your voice; but sometimes writers needlessly worry  about “borrowing” from other writers. I guess it’s critical to clarify borrowing. Stealing somebody’s IDEA is another thing altogether and it’s a bad, bad thing. You CAN’T claim you wrote Gone With the Wind but You CAN write a Civil War saga entwined with a love story.

Borrowing technique or approach is how we learn from other writers, from reading their plots, loving or hating their characters,  often wishing we had written anything half as good.

It’s a good thing to borrow something you like, such as a type of character, a kind of crime, a certain pace that drives tension, a way of having characters talk to each other.

Then write something you’d just love to read.

One way writers exercise is by making up analogies and metaphors, which can be done in a sitting position. This offers advantage on hot days like this day in Chicago; so here’s a few really bad metaphors that are cooling:

1. Navigating life is like being the lure on the end of a fly-fishing rod. If the fisherman is deft, the experience has rhythm and grace and lands you in the perfect spot. Sometimes the fisherman is not deft.

2. Hearing your name called unexpectedly to speak, in public, to a big crowd, a smart crowd, is a lot like being a random ice cube tossed in a glass of God knows what.

3. If you wear a lace dress in hot weather, you will know what a wedding cake feels like when it’s left to melt in the sun.

4. Avid sports fans are like melon balls. They came from different places but look and smell exactly alike.

5. The best way to be cool when you are not is to emulate a carrot. Have you ever seen a carrot that looks hot?

Mom’s social network was the telephone, during 1950-1960s years she and Dad raised my two brothers and me in Elmhurst, Illinois. It was black and hung on the kitchen wall with a twisty cord about 3 feet long.

I liked Mom being on the telephone for three reasons:

1. It brought a feeling of expansion and news of the outside world to our house, a festive air just hearing Mom talk, generally to one of her two sisters.

This leads to reason #2:

2. It took Mom’s attention off of us. Also festive.

3. It placed Mom in a geographic location. This reason has assumed greater import since then because I miss it. I miss knowing where a telephone caller IS. When I was away at college talking to Mom she was rooted in her kitchen. When I married and moved to Iowa and talked to Mom, same thing. While I was at work and while I was a new Mom I didn’t always welcome her calls but I took for granted Mom was there, in our kitchen, like always. Much later, Mom contracted a disease that rendered her unable to talk and that ended. The always part ended.

Today, I often ask friends and family callers WHERE they are. I just want to know. I like knowing.

A primo reason for writing my blog is selfish. I want to connect with what’s inside where history and reflection and memory occurs. It’s okay that this may hold no interest whatsoever to anyone else; yet over time I have come to know that the blog doesn’t see things that way.

Recently I was too busy, I thought, to indulge in history or reflection or other luxuries of the mind so I didn’t blog for some days but the blog disagreed. The blog insists. The blog exists. The blog sits and waits for you to arrive, looking at its watch.

As a working journalist I understand assignments and deadlines and must-dos but this isn’t like that. I can’t say I understand the pull of the blog but I respect it. I’m in.

Ha! You’d think, or at least I thought, that writing becomes less surprising the longer you do it and I’ve been doing writing for some years.

I was wrong.  Here’s what happened:

I started writing a story for no particular reason I can think of. I told somebody I trust and like, who happens to be my son, that I was doing so and he said, “Oh. the story found you.”

Just like that. He was correct. His being correct was not the surprise. A story finding me. This hasn’t happened before. It feels like a tug on your skirt around the knee. You cast your eyes downward and see little fat fingers of a child who may or may not be your own, wanting to be picked up.

So of course you do. I did. What a surprise.

Recently I started handwriting a story.  I had a pencil and a notebook so that is what I used. I was making no statement against technology. In fact, as a journalist I think with my fingers at a keyboard. I may think at other times as well; but when I write it’s at a keyboard.

Something I had NOT thought about before was the fact that typing is only slightly older than a century. 10 fingers using a keyboard first appeared around 1880 and even then it was a novelty.

This was okay interesting but what was new to my brain was realizing that the lion’s share of our world’s literature has been written long hand. Did I know that? Yes. Did I realize it? No.

Shakespeare and Dickens and Tolstoy and Twain and you-name-them produced their work at roughly 20 words per minute. That’s the average. I don’t know if that’s the number of words I averaged. I do know it slowed down my hands long enough to engage more details. 

Try it. See how you do writing long hand. Might be the beginning of a trend. At least it’s something not to forget.

Every Memorial Day is a good day because folks are really at their best, I think. Remembering is not easy when the remembering is about a loss and doing so takes bravery.

It’s easier to remember Memorial Day as a day, just a day in early summer. That’s easy.

During the 1960s in Elmhurst, Il, we used to spend this weekend surrounded by the peonies Dad grew like a single strand of pearls around the neck of our ranch house. We had orbs of fushia and itsy-baby pink and white with burgundy tongues. Dad snipped ’em and parked them in plastic milk cartons Mom had saved for the weekend trip to the cemeteries not very near to our house where our deceased relatives resided.

A caravan from the western burbies included our family of five, our Lombard and Bensenville and Downers Grove cousins, mums, pops. Maybe 60 of us in all. We were for that day a caravan of bohemians somehow together. And the smell of peonies were with us.

Maybe what you see is never as important as what you feel. I don’t know but the feeling on these trips was really really close.

We did dumb things because we were kids or because the feeling of being close set us free. We romped around the cemeteries we visited. Romping was not as I recall the modus operandi of our everyday lives.

We romped. And we had the peony smell all around us. And there was loss to think about and people who were with us before but were gone now.  And we were together.