Writing

I used to say that I wanted to be a writer. But recently I realized that I’ve been writing pretty much all my life.

I started writing in earnest poetry in high school. Most of that writing was filled with observations and angst from a teenager. Some of it was decent. I particularly remember certain lines from that time.

“Sitting myself down upon a rock, I said unto myself . . .” Haven’t the foggiest what experience that was trying to describe. What I feel about it now is that I was trying out my own rules and philosophy in a world where I did not fit.

I threw most of those poems away when I left my first long term relationship. Somehow, that collection did not fit into my life any more. It was just garbage writing. Art and trash all at once. I imagined that pieces and parts of that bag of trash might be found in an Iowa landfill sometime in the distant future when we learned we needed that trash instead of making new trash.

Five years ago, I threw away the pieces I had kept that had felt important in the intervening 30 years. I would periodically flip through the pages of the remaining collection. By 2015, none of them mattered much any more and they are now in a Texas trash heap. Probably never to be found again.

There is only poem I regret throwing away about 42 years after I wrote it in1973. I’d just turned 17. I was kicked out of college for having a friend who had marijuana in his dorm room on the Lubbock Christian College campus found in an illegal search by a campus cop. Norman, I think was the cop’s name. That’s how it worked in those days. Not enough degrees of separation, I guess.

My parents did not know what to do with me, so I suggested I go live with Granny for a semester and take a couple of “extension” classes. (I only finished one and it was a course on the plays of Shakespeare.) We traveled to Panama City. Stayed in a motel across the street from the beach for 3 nights and just walked the beach.

On the first morning, we walked across the road. I ran into the water like I’d done when I was 6, 7, and 8 years old. Straight into the waves crashing into me on an overcast and windy day. When I stood up, I could year a sound. I looked around for it and Granny was worriedly calling me to come back. I did not want to at first, but she looked old and afraid. Not the Granny of 10 years before.

“You wanted me to come closer to the shore, and to you, I think.”

I don’t know what the rest of the poem said. There were observations there I cannot recreate. But that feeling I can still feel when I read them or think them. I wish I could remember the rest. But I am no longer 17.

Yes, I have been writing all my life even if not on paper. I always feel like I am watching events from a point just outside the center. You know the place where the body when somebody dies and comes back to life. Just above and to the side of the body. This is where I write.