Response to Brett's Memory 1, Week 3
Brett,
I agree that your use of language is impressive. And I'm not following instructions here, but I have to say anyway that I love your play with words. When you say "insomnia often fastened me to the drawing table near my window," I'm jealous that you thought to say that. You consistently use concrete images that wake up the scene and you're setting the scene more thoroughly now that Davidson made that suggestion. I think you're also following through with trimming the prose and letting the sharper language say more than it could before. Maybe you could seek out a sister scene in Indy to make a connection and keep the story moving. Also, add some reflection. What does this scene invoke for you personally? That's all I can offer. I love what you're doing. And I want to hear more about Korea.
Showing posts with label Week 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Week 3. Show all posts
Monday, February 6, 2012
Peer Response 1, Week 3
Response to Susannah's Memory 1, Week 3
This story is chock full of interesting, ripe happenings. To start in the middle of the action, you might think of opening with "The house across the street from us was a drug dealer’s mansion" or a brief quip about how your neighbor's tiger crashed your cousin's coming-out party.
Also, you could make this memory pop by streamlining your prose. For example, what if, instead of saying, "I imagine the tiger must have been doped up on some kind of sedative because my father grabbed the chain that hung from its neck and walked it back to the neighbor’s house as if it had been a puppy Labrador that had come to join the festivities and beg for left-over meatballs," you shortened it to: "I suspected animal doping when my father led the tiger back home by its chain, as though it was a puppy Labrador, come to beg for left-over meatballs." That's certainly not the only option for cutting the prose a bit, but I think trimming the language allows the spotlight to remain fixed on this unexpected scene.
I'm fascinated with this background of yours. I imagine you have lots of other stories from this kind of odd neighborhood mingling. I'd love to hear them!
Reportage, Week 3
(This probably isn't a 'normal' response to a dead mouse. But it's mine and I own it, whatever that means.)
Lovely Mouse
Last Monday, I stooped near the steps in my back yard to take a closer look at a dead mouse. I didn't know he was dead. He looked on the verge of taking a deep breath, of expanding his warm round middle before turning over in his sleep. I wanted to touch his jagged chestnut fur, give him the only petting of his brief life.
The mouse looked friendly enough, as though he had always been open to human touch. I crept closer, attracted to soft, relaxed eyelids. I think I remember long eyelashes. Lured to his side by the pink nose, his fat center. All rolled up in a fleshy bundle, he seemed not to have a tail at all. Was it the tail that repulsed me?
I nudged the mouse, expecting his eyes to widen, his feet to hurry him away to the field at the edge of the yard. I was grieved when he didn't budge, disturbed that he could be stiff with no outward signs of abuse. When I remembered, abruptly, last week's creeping rodent scampering past my feet in our basement, hunched low to the ground, sniffing his way to safety, his whip of a tail trailing his path, I squeaked. Not the same shriek that called Jeff to my rescue, promising to save me from unwelcome droppings and certain contamination. "I'll take care of it," he promised, placing poison in the mouse's likeliest haunts.
The lovely mouse means something else to me now, lifeless and plump on a bed of gravel just beyond the basement door.
Lovely Mouse
Last Monday, I stooped near the steps in my back yard to take a closer look at a dead mouse. I didn't know he was dead. He looked on the verge of taking a deep breath, of expanding his warm round middle before turning over in his sleep. I wanted to touch his jagged chestnut fur, give him the only petting of his brief life.
The mouse looked friendly enough, as though he had always been open to human touch. I crept closer, attracted to soft, relaxed eyelids. I think I remember long eyelashes. Lured to his side by the pink nose, his fat center. All rolled up in a fleshy bundle, he seemed not to have a tail at all. Was it the tail that repulsed me?
I nudged the mouse, expecting his eyes to widen, his feet to hurry him away to the field at the edge of the yard. I was grieved when he didn't budge, disturbed that he could be stiff with no outward signs of abuse. When I remembered, abruptly, last week's creeping rodent scampering past my feet in our basement, hunched low to the ground, sniffing his way to safety, his whip of a tail trailing his path, I squeaked. Not the same shriek that called Jeff to my rescue, promising to save me from unwelcome droppings and certain contamination. "I'll take care of it," he promised, placing poison in the mouse's likeliest haunts.
The lovely mouse means something else to me now, lifeless and plump on a bed of gravel just beyond the basement door.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Original Prompt, Week 3
Text: "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by E.J. Levy
Levy effectively brings in historical context (ie Julia Child's cooking show, the feminist movement, Watergate, Vietnam, and anxiety over oil prices) to help her establish associations between traditional family roles, her mom's culinary quirks, and her parents' marriage. Levy focuses in part on her mom's cooking of Child's recipes as a distraction from compromised desire (as Levy sees it). According to Levy, her mom--"widely read . . . an accomplished pianist and a gifted painter [who] speaks French and Czech, [and] is knowledgeable in art and history, physics, physiology, and philosophy"--had her "enormous ambitions . . . channeled by her marriage into a narrow course" (294-295).
Levy writes that her mom "was of that generation of women caught in the sexual crossfire of women's liberation, who knew enough to probe for their desires, but not enough to practice them" (291). Levy imagined or deduced that her mom was only waiting for the right moment to insist on her own liberation. She juxtaposes her mom's submissiveness to convention with her own schism against social conformity. Levy hints that although her mom never left (Levy had always expected she would), she did eventually throw in her apron, opting years later, for example, to order "a large, squat, hatbox-shaped vegetable torte with marinara sauce" in place of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey.
What impressed me about this piece is the way Levy chronicles the relationship between gustatory choices and the feminist movement, and ultimately her mom's subtle shifts in her role as the family's hash slinger.
Prompt:
Write about a family food tradition (or lack of) that embarrassed you when you had a friend over. Dig for a moment during your adolescent or teenage years.
Levy effectively brings in historical context (ie Julia Child's cooking show, the feminist movement, Watergate, Vietnam, and anxiety over oil prices) to help her establish associations between traditional family roles, her mom's culinary quirks, and her parents' marriage. Levy focuses in part on her mom's cooking of Child's recipes as a distraction from compromised desire (as Levy sees it). According to Levy, her mom--"widely read . . . an accomplished pianist and a gifted painter [who] speaks French and Czech, [and] is knowledgeable in art and history, physics, physiology, and philosophy"--had her "enormous ambitions . . . channeled by her marriage into a narrow course" (294-295).
Levy writes that her mom "was of that generation of women caught in the sexual crossfire of women's liberation, who knew enough to probe for their desires, but not enough to practice them" (291). Levy imagined or deduced that her mom was only waiting for the right moment to insist on her own liberation. She juxtaposes her mom's submissiveness to convention with her own schism against social conformity. Levy hints that although her mom never left (Levy had always expected she would), she did eventually throw in her apron, opting years later, for example, to order "a large, squat, hatbox-shaped vegetable torte with marinara sauce" in place of the traditional Thanksgiving turkey.
What impressed me about this piece is the way Levy chronicles the relationship between gustatory choices and the feminist movement, and ultimately her mom's subtle shifts in her role as the family's hash slinger.
Prompt:
Write about a family food tradition (or lack of) that embarrassed you when you had a friend over. Dig for a moment during your adolescent or teenage years.
Memory 2, Week 3
Friday Nights
Bailee chose a silver stone from the graveled driveway and etched a curvy line of gray into the green paint of my Saturn S-series. She was four and bored, waiting on her mom to take her home after a long day at daycare.
Bailee, blonde with Shirley Temple curls and a pageant smile, stopped only briefly at her mom's insistence. Lisa picked up her monologue where she left off. Something about an elk hunting trip she was taking that weekend. Lisa made small talk that evening, an attempt to smooth over the fact that she breezed through my kitchen door 50 minutes late for pick up on a Friday night. She made it up to me by keeping me an extra half hour with idle chat, ignoring Bailee's roguery and costing me a $500 deposit on a new paint job. I was distracted and nodding zealously, hoping to appear sufficiently appeased. Wanting Lisa to feel forgiven. To go home.
Friday nights meant laundering blankets and sanitizing cots, wooden blocks, Tonka trucks, baby dolls, manipulatives, and teething rings. Friday nights meant hiding toys under beds, stuffing cots in closets, and locking away art supplies for a two-day reprieve, a temporary reclamation of my space. Friday nights meant grocery shopping for juice, milk, applesauce, Lysol. Topping off the food program report and skimming the attendance sheets in case parents forgot to sign in cursive or log the drop-off or pick-up time. A slight that could cost me marks on my accreditation observation or dollars on my monthly food allotment.
I forged through my chores, sweeping the great room floor for the sixth or seventh time in a day, hiding the high chairs in the storage room, boxing up modeling clay and ABC placements, and taking down the pictures of people we don't know, photos illustrating babies and toddlers from diverse cultures and races brushing their teeth, washing their hands, or eating spaghetti.
Friday nights meant kitchen strike, according to my husband, who hoped that trend would change. Two-and-a-half days' reprieve from the black skillet, baking sheets, boilers, crock pots, and microwaves. Sixty hours of escapist lit, broken rest, American cityscape puzzles, apple-pie scented candles. Thirty-six hundred minutes of quiet.
By Monday, I would be ready to make toddlers into human circles, squares, and triangles in the living room floor. We'd make ice cream with a few ingredients and a ziplock bag. We'd turn the playset into a pirate ship or a firetruck. We'd make the letter 'A' out of play-doh or uncooked macaroni. We'd have an apple-tasting contest and name 'pink lady,' 'granny smith,' 'fuji,' or braeburn' our favorite. We'd read "The Three Little Fish and the Big, Bad Shark." And we'd start ripping apart orange and blue construction paper for Friday's pep rally.
Bailee chose a silver stone from the graveled driveway and etched a curvy line of gray into the green paint of my Saturn S-series. She was four and bored, waiting on her mom to take her home after a long day at daycare.
Bailee, blonde with Shirley Temple curls and a pageant smile, stopped only briefly at her mom's insistence. Lisa picked up her monologue where she left off. Something about an elk hunting trip she was taking that weekend. Lisa made small talk that evening, an attempt to smooth over the fact that she breezed through my kitchen door 50 minutes late for pick up on a Friday night. She made it up to me by keeping me an extra half hour with idle chat, ignoring Bailee's roguery and costing me a $500 deposit on a new paint job. I was distracted and nodding zealously, hoping to appear sufficiently appeased. Wanting Lisa to feel forgiven. To go home.
Friday nights meant laundering blankets and sanitizing cots, wooden blocks, Tonka trucks, baby dolls, manipulatives, and teething rings. Friday nights meant hiding toys under beds, stuffing cots in closets, and locking away art supplies for a two-day reprieve, a temporary reclamation of my space. Friday nights meant grocery shopping for juice, milk, applesauce, Lysol. Topping off the food program report and skimming the attendance sheets in case parents forgot to sign in cursive or log the drop-off or pick-up time. A slight that could cost me marks on my accreditation observation or dollars on my monthly food allotment.
I forged through my chores, sweeping the great room floor for the sixth or seventh time in a day, hiding the high chairs in the storage room, boxing up modeling clay and ABC placements, and taking down the pictures of people we don't know, photos illustrating babies and toddlers from diverse cultures and races brushing their teeth, washing their hands, or eating spaghetti.
Friday nights meant kitchen strike, according to my husband, who hoped that trend would change. Two-and-a-half days' reprieve from the black skillet, baking sheets, boilers, crock pots, and microwaves. Sixty hours of escapist lit, broken rest, American cityscape puzzles, apple-pie scented candles. Thirty-six hundred minutes of quiet.
By Monday, I would be ready to make toddlers into human circles, squares, and triangles in the living room floor. We'd make ice cream with a few ingredients and a ziplock bag. We'd turn the playset into a pirate ship or a firetruck. We'd make the letter 'A' out of play-doh or uncooked macaroni. We'd have an apple-tasting contest and name 'pink lady,' 'granny smith,' 'fuji,' or braeburn' our favorite. We'd read "The Three Little Fish and the Big, Bad Shark." And we'd start ripping apart orange and blue construction paper for Friday's pep rally.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 3
~"Would you rather be perpetually misunderstood or understood perpetually?"
~"She's already using your name in the past tense."
~Low Cost Spay and Neuter out of an RV in the Tractor Supply Parking Lot. There was a line. But I didn't see the first animal.
~(Quoting a tweet) "What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?"
~"She's already using your name in the past tense."
~Low Cost Spay and Neuter out of an RV in the Tractor Supply Parking Lot. There was a line. But I didn't see the first animal.
~(Quoting a tweet) "What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?"
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Memory 1, Week 3
Disclaimer: I think I've avoided writing about daycare because there's so much to unpack. I couldn't decide where to begin, so I just started with the waiting list, which always made me feel awkward.
Waitlisted
On the days that Christy won the showdown and left for the shop alone, Kenzie forgot all about her before the Yukon took a right out of my driveway. Sally managed me. I managed the children. The children managed the moms.
Waitlisted
When three-year-old Jake got waitlisted for daycare, his mom tried to bull open a seventh spot. Six was the legal limit. I don't recall the nuances of Janie's petition, but the sting underneath was painfully dealt: “Can't you fudge a little for your daughter's best friend's mom who's six months along and sits three pews back from you at Sunday service?” Then she sicked her husband Steve on me, who added the guilt of his wife's fragile emotional state and possible need for continuous bedrest.
In Woodland, Alabama—population 186 according to the aging town limit sign—there is one school, one bank, one gas station, one beauty shop, one-half of a restaurant, one recycling joint, roughly seventeen churches, and six daycares. At least there are six that anyone official knows about. All in, local parents have four basic options: Grandma, Rita's Little Angels Preschool, rogue underground home-based child depots, and licensed home providers like me. And there are three like me.
Parents in need of daycare hash out the ins and outs of center versus home care at t-ball games, Sassy Scissors, and at the Grapevine over pita bread and fried chicken. Moms drop words like “socialization” sometimes, but the buzz mainly falls to provider reputation, cost, structure, level of exposure to sickness, and preparation for kindergarten. No mom wants her child to be behind at five years old. Scholarly preparation for preschoolers falls reductively in the “learn through play” camp or the “whiz by worksheet” camp.
Janie—a stay-at-home mom—wanted socialization for Jake with minimal exposure to vomit, snot, and diarrhea. Also, loose structure, a provider she knew personally, and prep through play ranked high on her list. The best I could do was offer Janie a drop-in option for days that other children were out. She took it. When Janie dropped Jake off for the first time, he had his own stipulation. “I'll stay, but I ain't eatin' no beans.” Jake had a penchant for stomping the feet of other children when my back was turned. Sometimes I forgot to call Janie when a spot opened up for a day.
Waitlisted kids rarely got in anyway, most years. Spots generally only opened up when an enrolled child started school. Jennifer—eventual mother of three—once paid six months for a ghost child so that her as yet unborn son could get his sister Carley's spot after she started school. So Carley was replaced by Callen. And five days a week, 6:45 am to 4 pm, Callen, Cade, Kaylie, Kenzie, Kenzlie, and Mattie—this is not made up—played their way through my home into my family.
Callen, carried in by his father religiously at 6:45 am every morning, slept on the couch while the seven-o'clockers ate a starch, a protein, and a fruit, my husband Jeff feigning a craving for their hot biscuits and milk, raising the decibel to an unbearable level before complaining in my ear that it's too loud and leaving for work.
Without fail, Mattie and Cade arrived at 7:45 am, their mom throwing them at me, their tongues and chins stained orange from popsicle juice, the standard bribe to hurry up and get in the van.
Kenzie's mom—who answered the phone at her husband's body shop for a living—brought Kenzie's 10 o'clock "breakfast" from the Grapevine every morning as a bribe for her to stay. A “salad” consisting of shredded cheese, banana peppers, thousand island dressing, and bacon bits. No lettuce. Christy stood next to Kenzie while she ate, putting off, or prolonging, the whiny exchange over her mom leaving a half an hour later. Sometimes Christi gave in and took Kenzie back to the shop with her. Sally Kelley, a provider mentor from Auburn University who visited me once a month for on-site training, had something to say about that. According to Sally, Christi was conditioning Kenzie to use negative behavior effectively.
Apparently, Kenzie has a timekeeper in her subconscious that allows her to record and remember how long she needs to cry to get mom to take her back to the shop with her. Here's how it works. If Kenzie cries for five minutes, and mom says no, then she cries for ten minutes, then fifteen, and so on. (Sally theorizes in five-minute increments). If, one day, after a 30-minute whine, mom finally caves and loads Kenzie back in the Chevy Yukon for the seven minute ride back to Andy's Body Shop, Kenzie's invisible clock tells her instinctively that thirty minutes is the ticket out of daycare. After that, it's up to Kenzie to decide if she's willing to invest that much time on any given day. Thirty minutes of crying is as long as it sounds.
On the days that Christy won the showdown and left for the shop alone, Kenzie forgot all about her before the Yukon took a right out of my driveway. Sally managed me. I managed the children. The children managed the moms.
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