blog writing – A Roaring Good Yarn

“What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason.”
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses: Poems

This year marks a milestone birthday for me. I suppose every year is a marker of some kind, first marking our starting point and then where we are now. This new marker has me feeling particularly nostalgic and I’m not sure that would be the case had the events of the past few years gone differently and made me less introspective. In any case, I have a story about nostalgia and it begins with music, yet again.

One Saturday in November my husband and I decided to visit a vintage holiday marketplace. We were there mostly for the retro atmosphere, to get into the festive spirit, and perhaps find some one-of-a-kind gifts. Most of the vendors were selling new and used Christmas decor, and we enjoyed ourselves for an hour or so, laughing over the many antique decorations we recalled seeing in our childhood homes and other people’s harvest gold or avocado green living rooms in the seventies. There was a lot of “do you remember this?” And “my grandma had one just like that!” Items we might have considered tacky as children were now whimsically magical and worthy of a second look. So on we went, browsing here and there, and sometimes gasping in unison at the elevated prices of those same tacky knickknacks. Eventually we grew tired and were heading for the exit door when a small booth caught my eye. It immediately drew me in like a magnet because it was filled with cardboard boxes of used records. That was it, nothing else, and not one sparkly holiday decoration in sight. Just a few portable tables lined with open boxes of vinyl. I flipped through one stack and the first album I happened to pull out for a closer look was Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

I held it in both hands and read all the song titles, probably with a sappy grin on my face. I have fond memories of that album. I heard it for the first time in an all-girls, junior high school gym class by way of a young and therefore cool female teacher, who played “Don’t Stop” on a portable record player at the start of every class, while we performed warm up exercises to it before heading outside for the long distance run we all dreaded. Even now, hearing that uplifting song makes me think about sideways stretches, jumping jacks, and high kicks in terry cloth gym shorts. Some administrator with a mean streak decided in the second semester to make us fourteen year old girls share gym time with grade twelve boys. They quickly took to stretching with us to Fleetwood Mac and only because our young teacher was attractive. Awkwardness ensued, mostly for the already awkward girls like me, who had no idea where to look and suddenly forgot the sequence of every move. One day the guys had a substitute teacher show up for their class. I heard all about Mr. Hot Teacher ahead of leaving the change room. The second I did, I spotted him and then excitedly called out his first name as I ran across the gym to envelope him in a fierce hug. He was my big brother’s best friend, ten years older than me, who’d first started hanging around our house when I was still in diapers. I didn’t stop to think how it must look to everyone gaping at us. Then I made it worse by loudly announcing in the echoing gym how much I missed him coming over to the house. Let’s just say there were whispers, raised eyebrows, and sidelong glances directed at me during that particular warm up. My brother’s friend and I laughed about it when we saw each other again several years later. Vivid memories like these prove that music is the soundtrack of life. At that time, a magical kind of marker made of shiny vinyl.

Strangely, I considered buying the record while standing in the marketplace booth. It was only five dollars for a bit of nostalgia that made me smile. I couldn’t remember the last time I looked at an LP, much less bought one. Yet there I was still gripping it with both hands, reluctant to let it go. The vendor was a woman about my age and for a moment we warmly reminisced about our favourite rock bands. She told me that she’d hung onto her teenage albums for many years. Then one sad day, she was involved in a highway motor vehicle accident in the Fraser Canyon while in the middle of moving house. Her box of records flew out of the back of her truck on impact and tumbled a long way down to the river at the bottom of a steep, rocky hillside. Lost forever. She said she was physically fine after the accident, but was sure her heart had broken a little that day, just like her records. Over the years since then, she’d rebuilt an even larger vinyl collection, but had far too many now and felt it was time to let some go. My husband was patiently waiting for me, so I tucked Rumours back inside the box, telling her I didn’t have a turntable. She told me that was easily fixable. Is it? I wondered. Then I thanked her for her time and carried on, thinking it might be kind of fun to have a turntable again. Silly, though. Why would I bother when I already had the ability to listen to Fleetwood Mac anytime I felt like it? What was the point of going back in time? Why add unnecessary clutter to a home already filled with too much stuff? So that was that. End of story. Until it wasn’t.

A few weeks later, I was scrolling through online Black Friday deals when I came across a suitcase-style, portable turntable that was similar to the one I used to tote around with me when I was a kid. Only this new modern one was nicer and a much better colour than the plain, two-toned brown one that my parents gave to me one long ago Christmas morning. It was also on sale and a reasonable price by today’s standards for something frivolous. So I purchased it on a whim, then proceeded to forget about it over the days to come while busy gift buying for family and friends. It wasn’t until early December that I received a shipping notification for the purchase. I was surprised how quickly I’d forgotten about it, and then found myself daydreaming about setting up the turntable over the holidays to listen to the small collection of combined records that my husband and I had stored away…somewhere. I told him I remembered seeing them not that long ago, and he laughed at me because he said it had been years since we last saw them. Besides, he was pretty sure we’d sold them at a garage sale or donated them, he couldn’t remember which. I felt like an idiot and my embarrassment must have shown on my face because he made a valiant effort to go searching for what he knew had to be long gone. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. He was hoping that he was wrong about it. That maybe the years had blurred both our memories and somewhere a box was buried like a forgotten time capsule. No such luck. They were gone and I felt unreasonably sad about it. I was being silly again, no doubt about it. Clearly those records had meant little to me or they’d still be hanging around, just like the dusty, treasured books I’ve hung onto for years because I still can’t part with any of them.

So now I had a turntable on its way and nothing to play on it. I kept thinking about the Fleetwood Mac one I’d recently let slip through my fingers. My husband reminded me I could buy records in secondhand shops and even new albums, if I really wanted them. Problem was, I wanted my old ones back. I wanted to remember what I’d once decided to keep, even after there wasn’t a use for them anymore. The special ones. The soundtrack of my youth. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t visualize the albums that were missing. Soon I realized this wasn’t about the lost records. It was about time moving too quickly to fully comprehend its swift passage. If I could forget about not holding onto those records, what else might I forget in the years to come? I thought about the woman who’d rebuilt her teenage album collection after everything had gone tumbling down a hillside. I didn’t want to rebuild my old collection. I didn’t even really want a new collection. What I was searching for was the girl who used to somehow balance a thick stack of albums under one arm, while also firmly clutching the handle of a suitcase turntable. Somewhere in time, she’s skipping her way to her best friend’s house to share the A side of a new record because every vinyl collector knows the A side has the best and most memorable songs.

As for the new turntable? It got lost in the mail over the Christmas delivery rush. Then it got rerouted and I forgot about it all over again. Miraculously, it showed up on my doorstep on New Year’s Day, of all days. A gift from past me to present me. And a reminder that everything important reveals itself again at exactly the right time.

Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac (Official Music Video) Hope the song makes you smile!

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you
will write now.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

It’s been a long time since I shared another story here. Mostly, I’ve been preoccupied working on the second draft of the novel I finished writing in June. Yes! I finished it. I could hardly believe it myself when I wrote The End. In fact, I had to keep going back to check those two words to make sure I hadn’t imagined the entire process.

From the first chapter to the last, the writing of it poured out of me during the span of a little over a year. I can’t say why or how that happened because it seems like a fever dream, as I look back on it today. The words were flowing all of a sudden. The plot possessed me to the point I lost sleep and sometimes couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming the scenes. The characters became real people, their voices constantly interrupting my thoughts like toddlers demanding to know the why of everything.

I filled notebooks with scribbles of dialogue, plot points, and disjointed observations. I’ve gone back recently to try to decipher the notes I wrote. Often they were made at around four a.m., right after I jolted awake with a thought I needed to jot down before it escaped me forever. There were many times I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I finally gave in and got up, made coffee, and sat at the dining room table to quietly write until the time I usually got up. Then I would shower and start my day like any other day. Tired, but happy.

Somewhere in the middle of a messy, chicken-scratched page of plotting notes I wrote this: It’s not enough to be happy enough. I want more. At sunrise. On a boat. This time won’t last forever. Set the course. One of the characters in my novel is a musician and I think these might be his lyrics to a song. I didn’t use them in the story. I did, however, give him this bit of dialogue in the first chapter, “You know it’s okay to be grateful for what you have and still want more for yourself.” I suspect I was telling myself the same thing.

For the first time in years there’s been room in my life to explore the creative interests that used to give me so much happiness. Writing is the most important one, yet it’s an interest I’ve given the least amount of care and attention to. Why? Because I turned off that faucet a long time ago. The very nature of writing stirs memories and sometimes memories hurt. It became easier for me to move forward and not look back. Sometimes a drop would trickle out to remind me I used to be good at it. A poem. A paragraph. A witty observation. Then I’d get busy again and the words abruptly ended. Busy work, I call it. The things we preoccupy ourselves with to avoid looking inward.

This time was different. I gave myself permission to turn the tap on and leave it running. More importantly, every word I wrote was for myself. I didn’t think about who might read it. There was no imaginary audience in my mind. No sneaky editorial comments trying to derail me. No grammar police. No thoughts about publishing or rejection or doubting the process. No deadlines. Just me, moving forward page by page. Chapter by chapter. Moving forward, while also daring to glance over my shoulder from time to time.

Mostly it has been a joy to write again. Never hard, just all-consuming. Oh, how I’ve laughed at my own dialogue. I’ve gone back a number of times to read some conversations and cackled at them all over again. Slowly I fell in love with my characters, while at the same time not always understanding them. Near the end I wrote a scene that came out of nowhere and made me cry. I closed my laptop after writing it. I opened it again hours later and tried to take it back and turn it into something else. I really wanted to move the scene in a completely different direction because how could my characters hurt each other like that? Then I realized what I was doing was creating human beings. Humans make mistakes. So it remained the same, while I dug deep to find a believable way to help them grow together from the experience. Just like in real life.

A year is a long time. I expected to feel indecisive when I typed The End. Is it truly done? Don’t I have more to say about it? My husband once commented that I must be reaching the end of the book because I’d started to look sad while writing. Truthfully, I didn’t want the story to end. It had become comfortable. A refuge, of sorts. Yet there was no denying that what I was feeling was peace. It was done. I took a moment to enjoy the accomplishment, to be proud of myself. I printed it and held the stack of pages in my hands. Felt the weight. The work. I thought about my mom. How I wished she could read it. How I’d put a little of her personality into the grandfather character. How I’d put a lot of myself into all of it.

The End.

Only it really isn’t. I set the story aside to give it space and time before editing began. Let it percolate, a long ago creative writing teacher used to tell me. My characters had stopped speaking to me in the middle of the night. My dreams were my own again. I immediately started gathering notes for a plot idea that developed from the first book. I didn’t want to lose the momentum. I felt guilty about liking these new characters, as much or maybe even more than the first ones. They’re different, exciting. They have a lot to say, but in a gentler way. They’re not as rude as the others because they don’t interrupt my sleep to shout their ideas. It’s like they understand their story can’t be fully explored until I revisit the one that came before theirs.

So that’s what I’ve been doing, revisiting the place I started at. After weeks of letting it percolate, I fully expected not to like the story as much. I thought I’d be more critical, less enamoured. I have to say that I’m loving it just as much the second time around. It’s rough around the edges, often messy in spots. But it still feels like a gift from myself.

Tag: blog writing

The A Side

Fever Dream