We at Free Fall Fridays are amazed at how the
same prompt will result in many
different pieces. Most of us hand-write, but since I came to writing through
practical journalism I bring my MacBook Air.
Today’s pieces are all from my September
2014 file, with a theme:
Old small towns
prompt- He’s
a legend in his own mind.
Every town has
one, or should. I mean the man with the vintage, not old, 1950’s car all set
for cruising; the man with the leather jacket, blue jeans while the other old
codgers were wearing slacks, and, heaven help us, brylcream in his hair. I had Jake
in my hair too, as he was my brother.
Thank God nobody knew he used to be called Biff. Jake often parked his car at
the bar on the street side where he could easily cross over to the gas station
to supposedly get cigarettes, or cross down to see if anyone was smoking in the
front of the bowling ally, looking to see “if anybody is there that owes me
money.” Actually, he just liked to hang out.
I didn’t mind,
because I liked fresh air more than I liked that bar, the Moosehead, because
the bar still seemed smoke filled to me, although the pesky government had
outlawed indoor smoking. It never fails: “they” up on capital hill, never ask
us real smokers what we think. My god, it’s like bicyclists being asked to plan
the next superhighway. I said to Jake, “Jake, the snobs on the hill just ain’t
fair.” We were standing just outside the gas station.
“Tell me about it.
I think I’ll mosey over and—
“—see if anyone
owes you any money.”
“Are you coming?”
Jake asked.
“Oh yeah, ” I said. As we walked, me
in my slacks and Jake in his jeans, I said, “If you’re so good at walking,
maybe you could walk Sandra down the aisle.” It was the first
time I had ever seen anybody stop in mid stride before.
“Now, what’s that
supposed to mean?”
“I mean she
doesn’t have a father and you are closer to her than I am.”
Jake was a legend
in his own mind, doing a church walk would do him good.
Prompt- letter to grandchild
When I grew up
children could play outside, and no one wore a pack to school. I could carry my
food in a bag, fold it into my pocket, and then walk home with my hands free. I
walked a mile and a quarter, about six kilometers today. It took me an hour. I
would part with my friend Howard at the half mile point, and then walk on
alone.
I guess that’s why
I can be my own company today—we didn’t need any music or tablets. Do you know
what the guy who wrote Treasure Island
said? A man should be able to spend three hours waiting at a little train
station, with no books or electronic devices, and not be bored. You need a well-stocked
mind in order to do that; it’s something for you to work on.
We used to eat all
sorts of berries on the way home. Now I see berries going uneaten—what’s this
world coming to? We had television, in black and white, and we could get three
to five channels, depending on the weather. When you turned the set on, you had
to keep the sound off so it could warm up, and only turn up the volume after
the picture suddenly started. From the back you could see little glowing vacuum
tubes, and the picture screen itself was part of a really huge vacuum tube.
Radios had tubes too. In the kitchen our radio had no box around it, it had
been broken years before, and the antenna was a wire that went along the
cupboard and then up the wall.
And each house had
only one TV.
Prompt- (a picture from Swerve magazine)
When I was a boy
we lived in neighborhoods, walkable neighborhoods. The streets were built by
the government, in traditional Roman town fashion: a grid. Whoever thought that
real estate developers could do it better? For them, any plot set aside for a
shack for preventative medicine, or a library or fire hall, is one less shack
to bring in the shekels for them.
No one walks
because, when you get down to it, the developers don’t put in any focus: there is
no “there” when you get there. The kids try to use the all-night convenience
store, but that is a very poor substitute for grass and a park bench, a
ceremonial slab to climb up on, a promenade for people watching, tables for
chess and checkers, and an old civil war statue for the gamblers to make book
on where the pigeons would strike next. No drinking fountain for today’s kids,
just a sterile 7-11 out for your money, in a community that lets developers
take everyone’s money.
When I was a boy
you put down roots. If you wanted to paint your house fuchsia, who cared? A
giant chalkboard on your garage? Great, keep the kids off the street. And a
park swing set: No one cared that kids might not hold on tight—they always held
on, same as when they climbed trees. But trust a developer to say that
climbable trees, or swing sets, cut into the real estate gravy.
In my day you
didn’t need community gardens, because everybody planted gardens. The old folks
had their flowers; the young families had their vegetables. In my family I was
always in charge of the pumpkin patch.
Oh, and in my day
the kids could trick-or-treat. A stupid sterile mall is no substitute for
gnarly apple trees and giant rustling sunflowers.
Fear is the
problem: rumors of poisoned apples, poisoned candy. I have to wonder why people
always found the razor blades before they bit in, and it was never the choir
kids who got their pictures in the papers. A guy testified on Oprah that there
had been only two poisonings in America, and in both cases it was the relatives
of the kids, not strangers. But people with no roots, I think, are especially
prone to wild fears. It’s too bad. We need nice rooted human neighborhoods, not
prissy sterile ones.
Prompt- time keeps
flying
Whoosh! Wisssh!
Swoosh! That’s the sound of time flying. Now, I know what you’ll say, that time
can’t fly because it’s not in the air, it’s on the ground doing a crawl, a slow
slither, a stagger and a roll, no, a slow caterpillar hump, a snail ooze. Yes,
that’s time, an oooooze.
Nope. Time is in
the air, and it flies. OK, it floats, drifts, eases along, wafts… No, it
helicopters like a maple seed of our childhood—there goes summer! There goes
the leaves, the snows, the puffy parachutes of dandelions. Oh, ain’t life
grand?
If we don’t want a
frozen tableau and frozen smiles in a rictus world, well, we have to embrace
time. And it flies. And if time didn’t fly, we’d have to adjust our clocks so
that it did fly. How else to be reminded of the preciousness of each long day?
Can you store time? No and yes. If I store stuff I can create a time sink, a
joy well, a pit of despair. Forget stuff, live now.
Sean Crawford
August
Calgary
2015
Footnote:
We have a Free Fall Fridays blog that some of us occasionally post on. While it is OK to fix our spelling and punctuation, it is just not done to edit for publication, neither on our blog nor here on my own site. To be authentic, a Free Fall should be posted just as it is. Otherwise, prospective visitors to our meetings might get a false sense of how unpolished free-fall writing truly is.
Those of us who normally edit as we go, which includes me, may really benefit from free-falling.
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