Once again I sit in front of the blank computer screen: What, what, WHAT? This daily thinking and writing has become ingrained after writing a weekly column for the Knightstown Banner for about thirteen years. Until I’ve achieved at least one paragraph, even one sentence, I’m restless and discontented.
New Year’s Day
Yesterday I said goodbye to our Christmas pretties, swaddled them in tissue paper and packed them away. Bill dragged out the lovely Christmas tree, and nephew Kenny put it in his truck and dumped it at Ellenberger Park. Three of Bill’s nieces wrote on Facebook that they had also disposed of their trees in keeping with the Clarke superstition that the tree must be out before the new year.
Bah humbug! I believe in no superstitions. Bill went looking for a Christmas cat for me. (More about that later!) He was told that black cats aren’t chosen as often as others because of the superstition about them. Poor kitties!
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 14 years since we attended a family Millennium celebration at a golf resort in Tucson, Arizona. The family togetherness that brought people from several different states was wonderful, but it wasn’t our happiest New Year’s celebration. Bill was sick when we arrived. I came down with flu while we were there, and so did several others. Paul, the husband of Bill’s niece, Susan, was so sick that he put on his tux, waved sadly from the ballroom door and went back to their room where the staff served his dinner.
Bill and I had booked our room for extra days, intending to relax and spend the time planning our real estate business year. Instead, we spent three days huddled and shivering beneath the duvet before flying home via Denver, still very sick and burdened with four bottles of leftover champagne. (We had flu again the next Christmas which made us believers in flu shots.)
(Ah! My need to write has been appeased. I know where I’m headed with this essay, and I shall be content and at peace until I’ve exhausted this topic. Oh dear — what then?)
Early Thursday morning
“We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
To me, writing is a solitary act. Too often we permit ourselves to be swept up in a centrifugal force of the clamor of voices: television, radios, smart phones, social media such as Facebook and Twitter tweets. We seem unable to be alone with ourselves, and we blot out our internal dialogue with “noise.”
I relish the quietude of early morning. It snowed heavily during the night The pristine, track-free snow casts a hush that is echoed in my mind so that for this short time it is tranquil and free of external chatter.
Looking back at the intervening years since the Millennium — let alone those that have passed since I was a child — I feel as if I’m caught in some kind of time warp, a never-never land between the past and the present so that I’m not fully a citizen of today’s world.
It seems to me that everyone spends their time communicating, and that I’ve been excommunicated, so to speak. Even the Pope sends tweets viewed by over eleven million people. The Dalai Lama’s tweets are received by eight million people.
It’s my own fault because we can’t sent texts, don’t use Twitter, and I’ve only recently become a Facebook voyeur rather than a real participant. When I was a busy Realtor I embraced new technology. These days I’m content to be out of the loop and refuse to spend my precious time getting back in the loop. People demonstrate the wonders of their Smart phones and the apps that let them do myriad things. Our phone is the old-fashioned kind where you have to use the spoken word. More to come. wclarke@comcast.net