Something

 

 

I thought I would make you hungry. This doesn’t have much to do with the story I’m telling, except that I mention the Carnegie Deli in New York, and at the time I was writing about it, it was closed. I wondered if it still is. It is open, and here is a picture of their Rubin sandwich.

 I should have sent this blog four days ago when I was hyped, tickled, and excited.

For some reason, I’m not today.

Maybe I’m scared. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe it’s a completion let-down. Maybe that our washing machine broke down and I need to clear the space for the delivery man to bring in the new one. - Life happens.

Maybe it's not knowing if this novel I’ve had in the works for over thirty years will go anywhere. Yet, yet, I love my characters. They deserve a life, not to sit languishing in my computer.

In my novel,  Song of Africa: Miss Sara Rose wrote at the beginning of her journal:

“There is an old saying that once we start weaving, the gods will provide the skein.”

It turned out to be true for Sara and for me. I did not know when I began writing this story where it was going or where it would end. But the ending came.  A second Sara, a young Sara, entered the picture and completed the story.

I did not see that coming.

When I began this novel, I heard that a protagonist needed to be young and beautiful. So, out of rebellion, I choose to write about an unmarried 65-year-old schoolteacher who retires on the first page. She is beautiful, I couldn’t resist.

“A spinster school teacher?” said a friend. “That will never fly.”

“Oh yes, it will. You don’t know what happens in the story.”

Also, at the beginning of this writing, I didn’t know how a 65-year-old woman would feel.

What a difference 30 years makes.

Of course, I haven’t been working on this story for all of those 30 years. I have done other things, but I kept going back to it. I have aged. My story has evolved. I figured it was my learning story. At first, I wrote by hand, then I learned to compose on the computer. And when I tried to add dialogue, exposition, and description all wrapped together as true novelists do, I felt like the carnival performer spinning plates on vertical poles. The performer runs from one pole to another to keep the plates spinning, if one gets wobbly, it is likely to fall.

Five days ago, I was about ready to chuck the whole thing, for I couldn’t get the beginning right, and after tearing the chapters apart to have time jumps, I put them all back together in chronological order.

Miss Sara Rose leaves her little town of King’s Valley, Kansas, and embarks on her lifelong dream—to ride a river in Africa. And there enters The Rocinante, not the river boat of her dreams but a broken-down old launch (named after Don Quixote’s horse) that takes tourists up and down the Gambia River. The Rocinante has a skipper, a Caucasian engineer from Los Angeles, California. Thus enters a new life for Sara, a romance, a granddaughter, and when another Sara, Miss Sara Rose’s namesake, arrives, well…how much should I tell?

Surprise, I unintentionally ended up with a beautiful young protagonist.

It is the story of three women, Miss Sara Rose, her granddaughter, Patrice DeShane, and Sara Andrews, Aunt Sara’s namesake, their lives and loves. At the present time, it isn’t so outrageous to write about older people falling in love. See, if you wait long enough, your idea will become common. Better get with it to be on the leading edge.

I love hearing about work in progress, so I thought I would tell you a little about what I am doing. And that it is important to complete a project.

When I read the Introduction to Rosamunde Pilscher’s, novel, the NY Times bestseller, The Shell Seekers, where her publisher tells her he would love to make her rich and famous, but so far, she hadn’t produced the goods, she asked what that might be. “A story that spans your life,” he said. “a big fat novel for women.” She took the challenge and in her 60’s wrote The Shell Seekers. When she heard the news that it was a best seller, she was home alone in Scotland, so she shared a celebratory whiskey with the dogs.

I took that as a directive for a novel that spans some 80 years.

Song of Africa, a novel of 96,326 words.

Working cover by me:

 

How Are You Holding Up?

 

 

Camas flowers

 An open field exists not far from our house that somebody, I don’t know who, sneaked in when I wasn’t looking, leveled a parking place into the field, graveled it, and put boulders around the periphery so cars wouldn’t drive past the parking area.  Yesterday, my husband and I parked—not the way we did when we were dating—this was in broad daylight, sunny and warm, and we saw a walking path covered with wood chips that looped around the field where a couple of people were exercising their dogs.

It tickles me to see a large man leading a teeny tiny dog; the man saunters, the dog looks like he has a centipede under his belly, for he makes about a hundred mincing steps to the man’s one.

Such was an elderly gentleman and his dog who exited the path near our vehicle. We greeted each other, and the dogs greeted each other through the car window. His dog was the cutest little thing, an all black Yorkshire Terrier. You know how we use a baby voice when greeting a teeny dog? Anyway, the man told us that he had lived his entire life in the house that abutted this field, and that his grandfather had once owned the property, which was about 100 acres.

To the south of the field, a large residential housing area had bloomed in what was once an expanse of Camas flowers. This field would be like that, he pointed to the houses, but it was once a nomadic Native American campsite, and that saved the field.

Camas plants have large edible bulbs, which was one reason the Native Americans were drawn to this part of the Willamette Valley. The man told us that they would dig a pit, bury the bulbs, build a fire above the bulbs, and leave the buried trove for a day or so. 

When they dug up the bulbs, they would be a congealed mass, almost like a syrup, and sweet, a concoction that can be used to flavor food, and a substitute for honey, which is hard to find. Besides, a bulb doesn’t bite sting you, and the plants will propagate and those new plants will make new bulbs, and you can come back you can come back the next year and harvest all over again--that is if you don’t take all the plants the first time.

“I bet they found artifacts here,” I said.

“Oh yes, that is why the area was saved. My grandfather’s flower bed once held a mortar, a grinding stone, which he had found in the field. Many arrowheads were discovered in this area. I found one myself," he said.

Yesterday offered us a brief respite from the frustrations of the world.

 

This Leads Me to Wonder, How Are Other Households Doing?

 It became clear, for the umpteenth time this morning, that teeny irritations fill the spaces between the monstrous ones. This leaves us in a constant state of anxiety.

This conclusion popped up when I tried to wad a piece of paper, for it wasn’t really paper, and no matter how much I crumpled it, it had a memory and opened back up into its full glory. I wanted to remove a lipstick from its package, and that required scissors, for it was encased in hard PET or HDPE plastic. I don’t know why, for display? Protection? For additional frustration to our daily lives? The lipstick tube had tape fastening the top to the bottom. That should have been sufficient protection, but it wouldn’t hang on a display rack or fit neatly into a packaging/mailing box.  

Here we are drowning in plastic, suspected to harm humans. (Some attack the endocrine system and thus could harm newborn infants, and our Secretary of Health and Human Services is attacking Dunkin’ Donuts for using too much sugar. (I notice two rows of Easter candy in the grocery store. Hey, we can find sugar if we want.)

I mentioned minuscule irritations, but when we put the little ones on top of the big ones, they add up to a mountain. You know the big ones I am talking about, we have a President who thinks Gavin Newsom is the President of the United States, and our man in the White House—you know the one who bashed out a side of the structure, so he can spend oodles on a ballroom. A ballroom?! Oh, there is a rumor that it is a money-laundering scheme. (Remember, he is shrewd in Real Estate—escalate the value of property, get investors, do the work for cheaper than the money collected, and pocket the leftover money.) It amazes me that he is still our President.

 

Our White House resident lies to our faces, antagonizes our allies, insults world leaders, oh yes, and shoots people in fishing boats. (Drug smugglers? I don’t know.  So, arrest them, don’t bomb them.) He bombs a foreign country—against the law, rapes young girls—against the law—brags, manipulates, and gaslights, and he is still there. He can fart while talking to two little girls—a complete lack of decorum—and his supporters stand behind him, looking the other way. The gas and food prices are going up—he is still there. He sweeps up immigrants, sends I.C.E. into our cities, they shoot people, he defends them, and he is still there.

 

While we want to stop illicit drugs, almost every ad on TV (I never saw them until I got a new TV) is an ad for some pharmaceutical.  AI is putting out false faces of recognizable people who tell us I don’t know what, but it is becoming increasingly hard to tell truth from fiction. AND AI WANTS TO WRITE FOR US! And we didn't ask it to be in our computer and on our phones.

And we wonder why people feel crazy.

Go out, find a green field, and give yourself room to breathe.

💓💓💓💓💓💓 

Or write to me and tell me I’m all wrong.

Jo 

 

P.S. Hope for the future:  

Ah Ha, I found a photo in my camera of Camas flowers taken at my daughter's place in Creswell, Oregon. They do still exist.

 

P.S. Hope for the future:  

Ah Ha, I found a photo in my camera of Camas flowers taken at my daughter's place in Creswell, Oregon. They do still exist.