But anyway, I get attached to what I uselessly scrawl on paper. If I cared enough about the person writing (for instance, me), I’d be happy to read just about anything. Tea and lemon bars were served. But that is far from high class writing material. I don’t write because I care desperately about your lemon bars (so that’s what they call it these days… cheeky…).
I also don’t write because I have pretty much zero clue on how to make little moments seem important when I write. My favorite author, Jean Shepherd, was so good at making essentially little nothings important. You probably know him best as the guy who came up with the movie A Christmas Story. That Red Rider BB Gun will go down in infamy all because an author figured out how to make it important. Sure, I have lots of beautiful, surreal, or simply important moments and images knocking about in my head. The trouble is putting them down on paper and making the moments that mean something to me important to other people. For instance, there was the night when my mom, dog, and I were driving through the set up ceremony of Fish Day in Port Washington, Wisconsin last one night in July. The town went from a total ghost town that smelled like fried fish to what looked like a ZZTop convention within one verse of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” While I remember how much it felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone, I haven’t figured out how to make the combination of silliness, creepiness, and fishy-ness stick in a story. How depressing is that?
Then, there was the day my grandpa cried. My grandpa is a relatively stoic German patriarch, yet he is the one in the family that everyone goes to for advice and comfort. My grandpa had been up the last day of the trial until 4 am arguing in a jury. The case was two years in coming. The body of a newborn baby girl had been found under a hub cap in a forest. She was in a utility strength trash bag wrapped in towel covered in blood and afterbirth. The baby was frozen and gray, sucking her thumb. The people who claimed to have found her body in their back yard turned out to be the parents, and though the baby had been sucking her thumb, there was no medical evidence that she had been breathing. That way, she could have been a stillborn. The girl’s mother was found not guilty for murder or neglect.
The day after the trial, my grandpa called my grandma, mother, and me to the dining room table to say a prayer thanking God that He knew the truth. But my grandpa couldn’t get the words out. Instead, he cried.
I wrote a version of that story, and I had some people from my last college read it. They responded with “I don’t see the point of why you wrote that.” I wrote it because if the strongest person in your family was reduced to tears, you’d think it was important, too. I tried bringing it to a fiction class. The class said, “That would never happen. The narrator wasn’t even at the trial. Instead, she only watched the grandfather deteriorate as the trial went on.” How wrong they were. Yes, I only got to watch my grandfather come home looking sadder and weaker every day. No, I wasn’t connected to the trial. But it did happen, and that baby didn’t get justice. If I could make that into a powerful short story, I promise I would.
See? That’s why I don’t write. I can’t make these things important enough.
