“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
~Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections
“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
~Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections
“A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge.”
~China Miéville, King Rat
“It’s not going to last,” she said, carefully squeezing the lime into her drink and giving it a thorough stir. “You sound very sure.” He tried to keep the hope out of his voice. They’d done this dance before. Many times. “She doesn’t like to travel.” She dipped one finger in the drink, ran it along the rim and then licked the salt, tasting it. “But you just went to Vegas?” He hated the question in his voice. Hated the tingle of excitement elicited by watching her lick her fingers. Hated that he wanted details to think about later. She shot him a look of disgusted amusement. “Vegas isn’t traveling. It’s…” She searched for a word. He waited, knowing…
“Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.” ~Stephen King
He reached out, set the glasses on the dash. In their reflection he could see trees and light poles flashing by at seventy-five miles an hour. He couldn’t see the gas station he was leaving behind. He couldn’t see her standing inside, behind the dirty plate glass window. She’d told him that she couldn’t go any farther with him. That the bus stopped there and she was going to take it to some other godforsaken little town. Responsibilities, she’d said. He’d gotten in the truck and peeled out like a teenager and it’d started to rain just like in a goddamned movie. He stewed about what could have been while he drove for the next three hours. He finally had to stop at another…
“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”
~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce
“As a writer, I can think of no greater terror than confronting a blank page, except perhaps the terror of being shot at.”
~ Richard Castle, Naked Heat
It seemed like such an good idea: I’d take myself to lunch. Tea. Croissant. And a blank journal. A blank journal may or may not be an ideal companion. Its pages stare mutely at you as you sit, pen poised, listening to the buzz of conversation around you. It doesn’t ask how your holidays went. It doesn’t inquire after friends, family, pets, or the traffic on the way over. It just sits and, in the words of Uncle Remus, “don’t say nothing”. So I sat among the people who had the good sense to bring a human to lunch and had a private conversation with myself, inside the world of the journal. And by the end of lunch, the journal was a little less blank and a little less mute. Not a bad way to start the new year.
“Your silence will not protect you”
~Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
First, a few things I love: a great view; revisiting someplace and finding that I still love it or, better yet, finding something new to love about it; and a good story. I also have a great fondness for dessert, but that’s another list.
We’ve driven right by this spot at least twice before on the way to Alamo Springs Cafe (for their a-mazing burgers), but we never stopped to check out the view. It was worth stopping for. As we stood and admired, the kid asked about the structure over to the left. I told him it was probably a fire lookout tower and that it reminded me of a story.
Sometime in 1936 a girl took a walk in the woods of western Louisiana with a girl friend. They came upon a fire lookout tower and climbed up to check out the view. In addition to a view, they found a sleeping man. He was the CCC volunteer assigned to man the tower and was happily sleeping off the previous evening’s fun. The man awoke to a girl with big grey eyes and a dark ponytail peering at him. She was a shy 17 year old in a blue pinafore. He had a rakish grin, was 26 and, worst of all, was “Louisiana French”.
Of course he immediately began pursuing her. For two years he courted her with compliments and gifts and promises. The thing that eventually won her over was when he paid to have her mother’s remaining teeth removed, and then covered the cost of her dentures. He proposed, she accepted and in 1938 they were married. And then in 1939 they had a baby girl, my mom.
So, I explained to the kid, a fire tower like that one was responsible for my standing there, admiring that view.