I’ve taken my typewriter to the hospital with me for kidney infections. I have taken it on camping trips, and the sand has gotten in the keys. It is just like the most fierce habit you can imagine. It is there, and it stares at you like a conscience.
Erma Bombeck
And I take my computer but unlike a typewriter, it needs a power source. So, not camping. But then I haven’t been camping. I haven’t been anywhere the computer can’t go. In fact, I have a computer dedicated solely to travel. If if gets lost, stolen, or damaged, it.’s no big deal. It’s old and it’s cantankerous but this is, as Bombeck says, a fierce habit. You do what you have to do.
I write daily. Sometimes several times daily.
On the rare days when I must miss my 7 am writing group, I am at loose ends and discombobulated. I am not myself and there’s nothing for it, but to write.
I am not writing important treatises or compelling prose. No heart rending poetry. I am just babbling in my own little way. Bombeck turned her unique writing into a multimillion dollar enterprise.
I have no illusions. I am no Erma Bombeck, but she is my heroine and I use the feminine because she started her career when women were housewives.. She wrote about her little Dayton Ohio life and family and made a career of it0. I can, at the very least, make a habit of it. And I have.
I average 800 word a day. Stephen King does 2000. I am no Stephen King. Plus I have a full time job that is not writing.
It is the most fierce habit. I am in a really bad place when I can’t or don’t write.
I write essays, I write slice-of-life, anecdotes, snippets of short stories, character descriptions, rants, prayers. Promises.
I write a little bit of everything and while I am not successful, I am happy.
I will continue to carry my travel computer around.
My name is Gus. Gregory named me. Gus. No last name. Gregory is only 3. He’s not up to speed on the concept of last names.
I’m a superhero accountant and Cheez-Its bring out my powers. I wear them in a pouch around my neck. I can climb like Spiderman, but I can also fly. I am often blamed for not eating the mushrooms when they’re served. Gregory does not like mushrooms. His parents insist he try them each time, but he doesn’t have to finish them. Gregory so hates mushrooms that even a taste makes him shudder. He tells his mom and dad that I will just spit them out. I wouldn’t. That’s bad table manners. So, Gregory spits them out. Well spits it out. He will find the smallest one put it in his mouth with a grimace, wretch, and then spit it out.
His parents think he is overreacting. He is not. Gregory simply cannot abide the texture.
Gregory likes Miss Rachel on YouTube and his life-sized Cody doll. Cody is very soft and squishy. Apropos of nothing, Gregory will holler, “Peas and broccoli” and then collapse into peals of giggles. It always makes his parents laugh. Me too.
Gregory loves me.
I do not make his parents laugh. They think I’ve gone on too long. They are concerned.
I think it’s unfair that they try to shoo me. I’ve done nothing wrong. I am Gregory’s friend. His best friend. His only friend. Maybe when he starts preschool or daycare he will be done with me, who knows. I hope not. He is my best friend too.
During nap time, we whisper to one another in our secret language. This really concerns his mom and dad. It’s clear that it’s a secret language and it’s clear that we use it to keep the adults out.
Even Grandma isn’t allowed to know the secret language either and he tells Grandma everything. Even about me. She knows there is a language, but Gregory will not translate for her.
“Peas and broccoli” in the secret language is a phrase of complete exasperation. Oh for peas and broccoli. You get the idea.
But when I’m not around, Gregory doesn’t use the secret language. At those times, the phrase is just nonsense.
I love Gregory, but he will soon be done with me. I have served my purpose. I am similar to his dad, but I always have time for Gregory. No household tasks or homework to interrupt our time together. His mother is just a lost cause. She is so stressed. Trying to keep the home neat and orderly. Trying to get a promotion at work.
Perhaps they are right to be concerned. They are blowing it. There is only this one time that Gregory will be three. Will believe in me and my ability to climb skyscrapers or fly from one to another. Will make me spit out mushrooms and holler Peas and Broccoli.
Donna unplugged the modem, counted to 60 AGAIN, plugged it back in and watched the light. Blue, blue, red, blue.
“Damn it.” She looked at the clock. 17 minutes. They had 17 minutes to get her internet up and running. She’d called the company three times already. It was out statewide. She was just a cog in the wheel.
She opened the laptop’s camera and checked her makeup again. The lighting in the family room was not optimal, but that’s where the laptop lived and besides the background was more interesting than any other spot in her house.
There had been a hundred messages back and forth. Five phone calls. Now they had graduated to Zoom. Brian wanted to meet in person, but Donna was cautious. Overly so her friends said. She had no reason to think he was anything other than what he said, but she’d heard too many horror stories to relax. But oh did he feel perfect.
Oh, we’ve all heard it so many times it’s become trite. But one day you’re a snot nosed kid who knows nothing about anything and then one day you are a teenager and you know everything.
By 14, I knew it all and my mother was an insufferable fool. We were oil and water always and our differences were really apparent when I was 14 and she was 33. She was coming to grips with what was then middle aged and the “don’t trust anyone over 30” mindset. I simply knew it all. I did listen to my father. He was an exceptionally intelligent man and a much better communicator than my mom. Plus, I was a daddy’s girl. I still had some respect for his opinions.
I had an opinion about simply everything. Some of them were things I had heard elsewhere and simply parroted without any real consideration on my part. For example, I was certain my father was correct in his stated opinion that only Communists drank sweetened tea.
We were living in North Carolina, a couple of heartbeats from the South Carolina border and finding unsweetened tea, which is what our family had always drunk being the damn Yankees that we were, was an impossible feat. And given how hot things were from about April through October, we drank astounding amounts of iced tea.
Now I rebelled against everything my family stood for, and thus adopting our tea position was an aberration in my behavior. But I swallowed the sweet tea drinking communist thing in its entirety. I may have even taken it literally.
With my friends, I pontificated at length about the weakness of character sweetening one’s tea revealed. They, also teenagers, quickly formulated opinions that were in direct opposition to my own. I recall a knock down drag out fight with my best friend about it that morphed into an attack on my character because I listened to my dad’s cassette of Patsy Cline any chance I had.
Nancy, a hard-core rock ‘n roller, her brother went to Woodstock after all, was not having Patsy Cline.
We didn’t speak for a week.
But a funny thing happened on my way to middle age. I re-enrolled in college at 38 and began working on the degree I abandoned at 19 because I knew everything already and discovered I didn’t know shit. Suddenly all of my convictions were being examined and tested in the glaring light of the hard sciences and the social sciences. I was appalled at what I found in the crevasses of my mind.
It was probably the greatest growth period of my life — those nearly 10 years it took me to complete my degree. But I began questioning everything. I examined my beliefs and the way I was raised.
Hoo boy.
When the dust settled, I had a new set of convictions – much smaller than before – and an overriding, and perhaps overbearing, penchant for “Now, well it depends” welling up when asked a simple question. A degree in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and Appalachian studies while working in a teaching social work program will do that to you. In fact, it’s hard for me to develop a hardline conviction about much of anything these days.
Am I hiding in a cave? Perhaps. But I like it here. I’ve made it cozy and the few principles I do have, I will defend but I won’t insist that you share them. I am not that interested in convincing you that I am right, and you are wrong because:1) I’m not sure what’s right for me is right for you and 2) I’ve learned over the years that convictions are not usually well thought out. They tend to be knee jerk reactions to our experiences. If our experiences change, as mine did, we find ourselves shedding them like outgrown snakeskin.
I’m sometimes criticized as wishy-washy. I have no desire to defend myself against that label. But I will say this: I still find sweetened tea to be an undrinkable libation and am surprised at its longevity. I’m also still a Patsy Cline fan.
And for the record, I don’t want lemon in my tea either. In my water, yes. In my tea, no As they used to say in the wild west of the early days of the internet, your mileage may vary.
W. Va. Fur and Root 