This column first appeared in January 2020.
A new reader said to me that she found my columns to have been written from an “intensely personal” viewpoint. I mulled that over for a period of time before I admitted that she may be correct.
The first words from me that were published in the Eastside Voice (now the Weekly View) were the result of an accident of circumstance and a gentle misunderstanding between me and an old friend, a flub that eventually resulted in my cheerful conscription to the cause of delivering 600 words per week. I’ve embraced the challenge and at times, the words have flowed as if from an undammed creek; some columns are born fully grown. And then there are the deliveries that have been more difficult, and I have had to nurture the offspring until it had matured enough to present to an audience. The “personal” aspect of my writing is about my interactions, reactions and relationships with the people and places and things of my world. I guess the “intensely” part comes in when I honestly describe the misery of my anger-blasted childhood.
I wrote about when my mother lay dying, having rejected medicine rather than live a diminished life, and asking me from her hospital bed “do you get mad?” Asking indirectly if I got angry with her for her decision to leave the remaining three of her five children: Joni, Jaci and Clifford. I addressed the question in “Now I lay Me Down” (August 2013). In January 2010, I wrote of my mother’s determined ascent from dependency on the state to being a Licensed Practical Nurse in “A Single Parent,” a phrase I never heard her utter. When my father was murdered by my first bride’s godfather, I wrote of forgiveness in “Death in the Family” (August 2016). I was unsparing of myself when I recorded my conflicted feelings upon hearing of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in “April 1968” (April 2016).
Last January I wrote about “The Quality Of Mercy,” and how it was not “strain’d” when I shared my space with an angry man. I also wrote “Fathers and Daughters,” a recounting of my caretaking of my two daughters and my youngest granddaughter. In February, I gave the readers of this publication my gratitude, for it is for them that “I labor by singing light.” One of those readers responded to my March column, “I Promise You,” where I outlined my reasons for not making promises to anyone, at any time.
I am both the writer and the reader, and sometimes I feel disappointed with the effort I have submitted, unsure that I have properly conveyed the depth of emotion that I felt when I remembered some event or some encounter with the vagaries of life. Then, I will reach into the archives and re-read what I have written and find myself tearing up, thinking, “You done good there, Woods.” I freely admit that tears come easily to me, which they did recently, when I re-read a column about my friend. I wrote “I’ll Dance For You” in September 2014, confessing my inadequacy at comforting the hurting soul and speculating that it might be the result of the behaviors of my “abusive and drunken father” and his effect on my mother.
Laugh and cry and ponder the universe with me. Sing, dance, read the books I reference, listen to the music I cite and hear the poems I enjoy. Everything that happens to anyone happens to me and my children and my grandchildren and I feel it and write about it all, intensely and personally.
cjon3acd@att.net