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.
Writing Prompt: What’s Your TV ‘Comfort Food’? “Gilmore Girls”? “Friends”? “NCIS”? What show do you turn to when you are stressed, tired or just need a lift? Why?
I don’t watch television or stream shows or movies. I’m not visual and that sort of media doesn’t engage me for long. I might be tempted if there was a Silly Symphony or Looney Tunes channel I could get.
I did go through a spell where I watched Law & Order, usually SVU, for hours at a time. And I have no idea why. But it certainly wasn’t to give me a lift. It was an avoidance tactic. And it left me with disturbing images and cynical thoughts.
I’ve written elsewhere about giving up Law & Order as a New Year’s resolution one year so I won’t bore you with that story again, but I will confess that now and again – many months apart nows and agains mind you – I might turn on Law & Order while housecleaning. I don’t know why I do that either.
I do, however, have comfort music and comfort books.
When people I loved started dropping dead around me like raindrops in the April Appalachian Mountains, I developed what I call the Grief Quartet of CDs. It was actually 5 CDS as one was a double album. These were Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss, The Essential Leonard Cohen, AJ Roach’s Dogwood Winter, and The Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions. These 5 CDs have been in my CD changer of the Big Stereo since several days after Doug died in June of 2013. I managed through trial and error and stupid luck to attach an Echo Dot to the Big Stereo and then network it so that when I fire up the Big Stereo every Echo in the house (and I have one in every room) plays the music.
I crank it up. I pour coffee or wine or champagne. And I wallow on my Beloved Sofa, and I sink intently into listening.
My grief at losing 4 dogs, a father, a best friend, a partner and two co-workers within eight years of one another has morphed into sweet memories of days gone by. I have beatified the dead – forgotten their flaws and celebrate what made me love them.
My time with this music is now enjoyable. Music, for the most part, and this music in particular is never just background music. I listen with intent. One CD after the other. Sometimes I will use the remote to repeat a cut. Sometimes two and three times until I have wrung every drop of comfort out of the lyrics and notes that I can.
I will listen to all five of the albums. Dependent on how I am feeling as I finish the last one, I may fire up Mozart’s Jupiter symphony. I love that piece. I’ve had the CD since CDs first came out. I first listened to it with a Walkman and cheap headphones.
I also have comfort books. There are a few particular books – The Secret Garden. Skinny Legs and All. Time in its Endless Flight. The Princess Bride — That I will flip through. Or my collection of children’s pop-up books.
But every book in my house is a comfort book. I enjoy my walls of books. I like looking at them. Knowing they are there. I inherited many of them from two of the folks who died and they are mostly as of yet still unread. I don’t read like I used to. I hope to get back to it, but writing takes up a lot of my reading time.
My books are legion. I say, and people think I’m joking, that I think the only thing holding up the barn are the bookcases. It’s not a joke. The bookcases reinforced walls and the roof. I have far too many and I can’t part with any of them and I don’t need to. I live alone. There is no one to fuss about the piles of books everywhere.
But mostly I have comfort coffee.
I love sitting in this room on a quiet snowy day listening to the furnace hum as the steam from a hot cup of coffee bathes my face. I hold the cup like it is the Holy Grail. Unlike music and books, I can do other things while I drink coffee. I can think. I can write. I can make a to-do list. I can read. I can listen to music.
But I particularly like silence with the first few cups of the day. My brain is a noisy place and I sometimes can lower the talk radio in my head to a low murmur if I sit with the coffee lot enough. Multiple cups of coffee.
I always come out the other side refreshed and ready to get on with things.
You can have the noise and chaos of a television show. I’ll just be over here, sipping this coffee, letting my mind quiet and my spirit nestle like a dove who has returned home to her nest.
I’m working on the final proofreading of the Museum of the American Military Family’s book, E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure (Gender, Religion, rAce, Identity, Culture, and Ethnicity in the Military/Family.) As one of two Writers-in-Residence for the museum, I have been heavily involved with this book since January of 2021. You can learn more about the museum here.
I just got my grubby hands on the proof. Oh my. I am so proud to be a part of this project. The book is chock full of essays (11 of them are mine), photos, and quotes from survey responses that gave the book structure. The survey respondents ranged from age 9 to 92. There is even a statistical analysis and report from two anthropologists. We did it proud!
The first essay I wrote was on Identity. I also made it into a digital story which you can watch now.
The walk down Memory Lane that I took while writing my essays was by far the best time I had while experiencing the Long COVID symptom of extreme fatigue. I tired very easily and slept a lot. I had dream after dream of my deceased father, my childhood, and my experiences of the GRAICES.
That walk and a promise I made to myself finally spurred me on to begin writing a memoir based on my experiences as a brat during the Vietnam War. The memoir is a labor of love and tears. I’m referring to it as a collage–it will hold traditional memoir fare, but also short stories and poetry I have written, excerpts from my father’s letters home during his four tours as well as parts from his memoir, Expendables: Vietnam Memoir. There may even be a recipe or two.
My identity is all kinds of wrapped around my experience as a military brat. In one of my essays, I ponder how it was that the first 14 years of my life so marked me that all these years later (I’m 62), I still think of myself as a military brat.
E Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure will be printed soon and available for purchase.
I have eight more months left in my term as Writer-in-Residence and we are already underway with the next project. I hope it proves to be as much fun as this one. I would happily serve another two-year term, but I don’t think it works like that.
“Lunch,” he said. His tone was even, rational, devoid of any knuckle of bellicosity. “That’s what we call it in my country. L-U-N-C-H. Lunch. I’m fond of lunch. I am, in fact, a lunch aficionado. Give me liberty or give me lunch. Breakfast comes around too early in the day, and dinner can interfere with one’s plans for the evening, but lunch is right on the money, the only thing it interrupts is work.”
His voice rose slightly. “I require lunch on a daily basis. I’m insured against non-lunch by Blue Cross, Blue Shield and Blue Cheese. Finicky? Not this luncher. I eat the fat, I eat the lean and I lick the platter clean. … In the dietary arena, pals, I have nothing to hide, and would at this juncture gladly masticate and ingest Spam-on-a-stick if you served some up. All I’m asking is that you serve something up, and speedily. I become grumpy when denied my noontide repast…”
W. Va. Fur and Root 