I don’t write to be famous, I don’t write to be known, I write because I am and I want to be read. How sad to fill a room with paintings no one sees or play music no one hears. Writing is talking without sound, singing without score and dancing without movement and yet, it is all of them. It is a solitary art conjured from thought and expressed by the need to communicate.

HEAD SLAPS, SPEED BUMPS and LIGHTBULBS, one woman's WTF, oops and ah-ha moments of life.

They were published once, and as every writer knows, once is not enough.




Saturday, January 16, 2016

Part Three, The Present

This is the last of three posts which I have found to be mysteriously wonderful and full of questions. Do I have an answer? Nope. Someday I will and when I do I will be the one thumping on the door which divides and welcomes all of us.
 
Christmas before last I was working on a holiday column. The season was short and I was running out of time. I thought perhaps I could repurpose a piece I had written over twenty years before when my daughters were seven and ten years old. It was a sweet op-ed published in 1994.

I had a copy of the old piece which I was transcribing it into my computer for an eventual book for my children.  When I got to the end of the piece, it had been misaligned, half of the last paragraph was missing.     

The TV was on. (Refer to Part One)

I tried to add what I thought was missing, but the last couple of sentences stumped me. As I was typing the last paragraph, and struggling to fill in the missing words, for no apparent reason I randomly typed, “everyone knows,” at exactly the same time singers on TV sang, “everyone knows.” I think it was Glee. It got my attention. I replayed the scene. I had heard the two words correctly. Did I type them because I heard them? No, I had started to type before the words were sung.

For a few seconds I looked up at the ceiling and said, okay, I get it, I’m on alert. When I went back to typing I still could not come up with all the missing words. “Everyone knows”, did not seem to relate to the old piece. I had to find the original article.

Over the years I’ve saved almost all of my tear sheets.  My mother saved many in her colorful folder as did my mother-in-law, in a big brown envelope. In fact the Christmas before my mother-in-law passed away she gave me an album with many of my articles preserved in plastic photo protectors. The pieces saved were the really old ones, from the ‘80s and ‘90s.  Finding that album, and the original, would take some time. Time, something which I did not have because I had to leave for work. I did a quick search.

Immediately I found the album under the pile of manuscripts I was planning to box and store in the attic. I set the book down and opened the cover. There,  the very first op-ed, as pristine as if cut from the paper that day, the twenty year old Santa piece.

To me finding the article so quickly was like the Mark Twain incident years before. Or was it just a lucky find? And then I remembered the word match, which had put me on alert.                

“For all the skeptics, non-believers and Ebenezer Scrooges, when the hoopla of Christmas Eve is over and you collapse into bed exhausted, listen carefully. Everyone knows what Santa’s bells sound like. If you listen hard enough, you will hear them because Santa lives.”

Yes, I do believe in the higher-ups above us and messages sent from heaven. I also believe that if anyone could get through from the great beyond, my mom and dad could. I believe that just because we can’t explain it, does not mean it does not exist. Because I have experienced a lifetime of quirky little happenstances that have amazed me, and puzzled me, and in three unbelievable head thumping, heart stopping circumstances, saved my financial ass, I am convinced something else is going on.

Do I know what that something else is? Maybe, maybe not. Finding the article so quickly, no big deal. The words tucked away in my mind simply rising to surface at just the right time? Sure. But echoed from the other room as I typed, what is that about? 

What I do know, and learned early on, is that we must live our lives without blinders on and be open to the mysteries of life which surround us.  What is directly in front of us may show us where we think we are, but what goes on peripherally may show us how to get there.

 

 

 
 

15 comments:

  1. I've read your post like reading a suspense novel. I love it that you write about this, and it's so beautifully written. Thanks so much for sharing messages from the beyond with us, my friend. We all need the reminder. :-)

    As for writing and hearing "everyone knows" simultaneously, it gave me goosebumps!

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    1. Lilac, thank you so much for your kind words. They mean a lot.
      I still get goosebumps when I think of my life's magical moments.
      Last night I was reading DEAR SUGAR (TV was on) and in the first 5 minutes, "mother". I was watching a crime show, Investigative ID I think. Not a paragraph later, "family". I wrote the words down. It happens so frequently now that I don't usually bother to remember them.
      Dumb commercial, then "questions". That got me to lift my head and wonder WTF was going on. I changed the station. Five minutes later, "choosing".

      (The word "now" just happened as I typed this a few minutes ago.)

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  2. When you mentioned "Everyone Knows..." in an anecdote about Christmas, my brain immediately hopped to: "Everybody knows that turkey and some mistletoe... will help to make the season right." Now I've got the song "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" going through my head.

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    1. Hahahahahaha!
      I've got a friend who roasts chestnuts off his tree every year. I love him but hate his nuts.
      Oops, Hahahaha !

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  3. Ah, the mystical aspects of life are the best, aren't they? I, (again) have a vague familiarity of this story - told at a different time, maybe an older blog post, but it was just as good as the first time around - better b/c of the tie ins from Part I and II! You're headed in the right direction.

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    1. "You're headed in the right direction," from you, music to my ears.
      You are right, this was (in-part) from an earlier post. What a memory you have.

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  4. This is so beautifully written. Wow. I look forward to reading more. This is great stuff.

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    1. E.M you made my day. Thanks so much for stopping by and for the kind words.

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  5. Time for me to lurk around blogs :) Love these unexplained moments too. To think we understand everything would be silly (and boring!).

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    1. Hey Lennon, it's sort of like our own little Twilight Zone.

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  6. So you're writing again, right? Picked up that old manuscript to fix it up?!

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  7. Carolynn, I loved this so much. What a lovely reminder.

    When I moved to Oklahoma from Texas I had boxes and boxes of the magazines I wrote for. My son wanted to throw them away, but I said, "No, someday I may need those stories."

    You just never know when they might come in handy.

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    1. I think between me, my mom, my mother-in-law, and now my co-workers, who bring me my articles, (the papers are not sold in my town), I have pretty much everything I have published.
      Golly gee, I feel famous.
      Thanks for stopping by.

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  8. I've been dropping in here almost daily to see if you posted something new. You must be hot and heavy into your WIP! Yay! I hope it's going well...

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