Truth or Happiness?

if you desire peace of soul and happiness, then believe;
if you would be a disciple of truth, then inquire
--- Nietzsche

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We packed up all our wardrobes in Kentucky and put them on the bus to come stay with Mama’s mama here across the great Mississippi. It seemed so pathetic little what we tucked into our suitcases. We lived a good simple life. We lived as good examples of modest virtue and wholesome humility. We witnessed Christ in every act and every possession. Our family didn’t have trappings of greed to weigh down our spiritual journey here on earth like folks around all distracted by the evil of money. But just the same, once we tucked everything inside our cases I swear I oughtn’t to have had more than I did – simple righteousness or not.

We didn’t pack anything of our daddy’s with us, though. Not one thing of his did we touch. His worldly goods would be there – we wouldn’t dare take what might be missed. Somehow, between his claims of our sins and mama’s fortitude for our journey, we couldn’t believe then we took instead the only things he would ever miss. How could he miss sinners like us who plagued him so? If he came back that night, we didn’t know. We locked the door, slid the key under the step, and knocked the mud off our shoes as we crawled into our neighbor’s waiting Buick.

It was a month since he called the devil out of Mama. Now, I got the gift of tongues by the age of eleven, so I wasn’t too frightened seeing someone not quite themselves, really. The difference of course is that one is the spirit and the other is the devil. I certainly don’t mind letting the spirit into my soul, but I would be dead frightened, if I suppose I could be frightened, if I had a devil in me. I’d seen the devil cast out of folks at church before. But I’d never seen mama with the devil in her like that, fighting so much. I knew if anyone could save her from a demon, it was daddy.

It happened just before dinner. Mama had food all made and put it in the oven to keep warm like she did sometimes. I remember it was a little late, it was dark anyway, when he came in the kitchen door. He went straight up to mama and planted a big kiss on her cheek. I know because I was right there in the kitchen, and she looked right back at him this big deep gaze. I knew for certain they were the two people most blessed in love before God in the whole world.

We sat to dinner soon and we bowed our heads for grace. That’s when the devil took mama. She started sort of moaning and cussing real low. Daddy was quiet. Sis slipped out and said, “Mama,” kind of half question, half admonishment as if to say, “we’re saying grace now – what could be so wrong?” Then it really started up. Clearly possessed, she was screaming down curses, mostly on daddy, and some against Jesus, and half of it I couldn’t really understand just for the thickness of the racket being sent up. Everything in that noise got blurry.

Daddy grabbed us girls. I couldn’t tell you which was his hand and what was my own feeling of terror. He nearly lifted us by the shoulders clear off the ground and pushed us out of the room. “Go outside,” he said. We weren’t sure what was going to happen, so we moved towards the door, but we didn’t quite move fast enough. He had turned back to mama and was getting his big preaching voice up so she could hear over herself. But then he looked to check on us and saw we weren’t gone. We moved quick to disappear.

Really we slipped out and went around the back. We sat and listened on the porch, waiting to hear when it was calm, so we would know the devil was driven away and when it was safer for us to come back in. It wasn’t a cold evening, there was no chill left to the air. Spring was breaking out and the day had been warm. Lightning bugs would be flashing soon, down where the dead end street backed up on an old hedgerow copse. The trees ran the length of a ditch edging in the back of our neighborhood and the back of a tobacco field. I wanted to go down there now, to look for their little glowworms. I wasn’t listening to the world anymore, so I stood up, to go walk down through the ditch. Sis tood up too and opened the door to go back inside.

As she went in I saw Mama with her head slumped down, chin on her chest, and Daddy stooped down holding her shoulders. My brain turned back to where I was on the porch, it was quiet again, and so I moved on following sis. Daddy looked up and told us to eat before dinner was too cold. To Mama he said I’ll let you alone. He went to the front room, took out his jacket, and went easy out the front door. Mama just sat at the table. Her eyes were open. They were glazed and full of tears and I don’t think she saw anything in front of her. Sis went over put her hands on her lap and leaned into her gaze. That was like turning a switch, or waking up a dog. She stretched a smile on her lips, reached her hand on sis’s head, and looked at me. Her hands dropped to her lap and she swayed like a white cotton sheet in the breeze. She closed her eyes then and didn’t say a word.

the inner editor

So, I got a pep-email from the NaNoWriMo folks, which sums up pretty well a good bit of the thoughts going through my head about why I feel like abandoning the silly thing I'm doing:

... because our stories are really, really bad, and we're wondering why we're sacrificing so much of our time to produce a consistently crappy book.

It all adds up to the fabled Week Two Wall---a low-point of energy, enthusiasm, and joie de novel that strikes most NaNoWriMo participants between days 7 and 14. This is when our inner editors, who largely turned a blind eye to our novel flailings in Week One, return to see how things are going. And their assessments are never kind.

The plot is draggy. The characters are boring. The dialogue is pointless, and the prose has all the panache of something dashed off by a distracted kindergartner.

I guess then, back to the keyboard with a vengance this weekend. Until then, I'll leave you with my excuse for not posting more than I have (besides becoming self conscious, unusual for me I know, but true!). In my serect life as an urban forester I have an alter ego known to elementary school children as the Tree Lady. The Tree Lady was busy this week teaching classes about the forest we live in, the forest we plant and take care of in the city. The Tree Lady forgets that you're supposed to raise your hand before you answer a question, gives out hugs and high-fives, and has real tree cookies sliced from real trees that you can see and count the rings from the tree and find out how many years it lived.

The Tree Lady finished her busy week this morning by planting trees with the kids at their school. When the kindergarteners were told they were planting trees today, they thought they would watch a video of tree planting. In reality they got to come out to the playground and see a living two-inch-caliper Burr oak be taken out of its pot, and see how very fine and tiny roots are, how they feel hairy, and how rough the bark is (because it is tough to protect the tree, like a knight's armor ;). The fourth graders posed for a picture with their teachers (say: "trees") as they grabbed shovels to fill in the soil around their Linden. Of course, most sixth graders are far to cool to be interested in such things as what roots feel like -- though, the tough guys shovel dirt with gusto and the girls are very conscientious and a few young ladies this morning stayed to work extra and planted the third grade's tree for them.

Pandora might be a good pen name...

Honestly, to my perfectionist self I'm thinking, "my god what is this tripe coming out of my head?" Oh, well.

I was hoping to give you honest down-home kitsch and pulp, maybe a dash of outrageous humor and some trashy romance on top, but for the life of me, there are these people in my head, and they have this story, and I can't see that it is funny -- at all. Since this endeavor is really more for quantity over quality, at least just until I come up with a hell of alot more bulk here, I may switch it up on myself, so I don't have to dwell on these girls anymore, and start cranking out silly juvenile stories about pirates and shoemakers and viagra salesmen. The intent was to give myself a higher amount of writing while still producing something semi-coherent. I didn't excpect to start any real character development or thematic material... Oi vey!

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Everything was worn, and smelled like cigarettes. Dim and hazy, the greyhound station windows were tinted by diesel fumes. I walked shuffling my steps over the fine, slippery coat of upswept mud dried to the linoleum. Women were washing the miles out of their black hair squeezing their heads under the taps in the tiny bathroom sinks. No one spoke. Our jaws were as iron and stiff as our legs. Our eyes like the windows felt tinted with the same greasy dust everywhere and I kept trying to sweep it away on my sleeves. We had to wait to each wash our hands in the one sink left open by the bathing women.
We had been coming what seemed so long, waiting so long, we waited for everything and waited forever, any excitement or apprehension we had once was numb now under a blanket of weariness. Mama was leading us out by the hand, sis on one side and me to the other. If mama stopped walking and holding my hand so tight I would have folded to the ground and just curled up right there on that linoleum– I felt like making that greyhound station home, the shabby vinyl chairs my new bed, for all I wanted so much to be home and drop away into dreams or nothingness.
...
His dusty jacket smeared in spots with bits of grease was almost like camouflage in the shabbiness of the greyhound station. I was so tired, when he bent to hug us all together I couldn’t make any effort to avoid being nearly smothered with my nose flat against his chest. Later, when he was near bedridden, he would take to saying to us how we didn’t come delivered by a stork like other babies, but we came delivery by a greyhound. He loved us more than anything in the world. Where our own daddy was like a ghost we never knew where he would appear to us from beyond the veil separating us from the world where fathers came from, our uncle, mama’s little brother, was a concrete and real as we could have imagined a man to be. No disappearing. No wandering in the back door, coming and going. He was rooted to the same ground as the elms and oaks tracing the lane home and as solid as the weathered granite rocks framing the wide open gate.
###

when the world is on fire

When a house is on fire
the vessel salvaged
is the one that will be of use,
not the one left there to burn.

So when the world is on fire
with aging and death,
one should salvage one's wealth by giving:
what’s given is well salvaged.

What's given bears fruit as pleasure.
What isn't given does not:
thieves take it away, or kings;
it gets burnt by fire or lost.

Then in the end
one leaves the body
together with one's possessions.
Knowing this, the intelligent man
enjoys possessions and gives.

Having enjoyed and given
in line with his means,
un-censured he goes
to the heavenly state.
[Aditta Sutta]

Is suffering the state of nature, or a cultural tradition?
State of mind? ... Realist adoption? Or something taught and learned?

-------sketch4U#2------------
My sister. Swept away by clouds before her feet ever touched the impervious reality of our life. I’m the practical, the stubborn and upstanding. Upstanding in the sense that I withstood our hardships with more precocious rationality than her mind would ever allow. Her coping developed from within an inner thoughts I could never fathom, that wandered to and fro between our life here and the landscapes hidden behind dreaming eyes. Most of the time when we were together she was somewhere in between where I could meet her in those vast landscapes away from ourselves, away from our parents, away from the neighbors, and the suspicious meat-ridden stares of those hungry people for our precious uneducated souls.... Sister was born to wide plains of wild innocence, where she ran with nothing to turn an ankle on, nothing to impede her journey... From time to time I’d try and look for her, I’d only see her really from far far away, but always we were tethered one to the other by paper chains and middle names. By knitted wool and cloudy memories of nana’s nursery rhymes. By the silver paths our snails wove through the hidden place we buried our childhood.

The Kick-Off Sketch

Whoever told me the story once about the bourbon in the wahser reservoir, props, hon. Had a friend in highschool who had a similar interior cabin set-up. Alright, enough beating about the bush. Here goes-- Remember, it's quantity over quality until 50,000 or 11/30. Hopefully, we get to both.

---------------premier----------------
Tonic in the glove box, limes at the corner market, and sodas for Sis and me: that’s the shopping list what came to commence our Sunday ritual by the end of our Missouri bootheel summer.

With a bit of clever Ozark engineering, my uncle Tom had rigged up the tubing from his windshield washers through the interior of his dash. With an extra dose of Ozark practicality, he also filled the fluid reservoir with gin. It was an old bronco. He’d taken the top clean off, and we’d tear hollerin and laughin through muddy patches of land, my sister and I hanging on (literally for dear life, now that I look back on it) to whatever we thought might prevent us from bouncing right out over the door. Even a roll cage was a thing of fancy-pants racecar divers. The only real charm for this old hunk of metal was the holes rusted out through the floor of the cab, which when we’d hit a real puddle would turn into geysers and dot our faces with earthy dark freckles.

Crazy uncle tom! What was he doing with two teenage nieces drinking and trespassing? (Or so the family would have questioned if we had ever let on to the true activities of our Sunday drives to the river.) We loved it in our tomboy world – he was the only one of the family who gave in to our desire to play in the mud and fight and curse and hunt and generally avoid all demure and ladylike things we hated so much. Learning to drive a rusty hunk of steel through backcountry roads in the dead heat of my 15th summer seemed a wonderfully unladylike adventure to me.
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November is National Novel Writing Month.

"NaNoWriMo," fond fictional participants croon its pet name falling asleep with the satisfaction of their shiny new pages dashed off in the haste to reach 50,000 words by midnight November 30, 2006. Not me. I have one shiny little character sketch, and I'm beginning to wonder what I just signed up for...

Those of you signed on to this blog seem to enjoy my cute little writing escapades, so: I'm jumping on with this WriMo gig as my own kick in the pants. Plus, its got that maniacal dash of adrenaline fun that calls to me like a can of spam to a hornet. ("oooh, canned meat product" says the hornet; "oooh, grandiose creative challenge" says the T-fin.) I'll have some fun, try out this whole long-fiction genera, and maybe/maybe not, finish a little story for all of you.

Cheer me on. Challenge me to work inside jokes into the plot. And, if you would, please figure out how I can claim coffee as a tax write-off or health benefit; I'll thank you from the bottom of my mug. ;)