Eat my Bubbles - November 2010

                                                       Home of the Lions

 I am in the basketball gymnasium of local community college. It’s a Sunday in November, 2010. “Home of the Lions” the scoreboard says. Approximately 200 un-lion-like children age 8 – 13 mill about before me. Most are barefoot, attired in wet bathing suits soaked from their recent excursion in the official Olympic size pool across the hall. They scurry about this gym dancing as they chatter, moving always with the grace and lightness of water bugs. 

 

Between the pool and the gym is a hall that is filled with myriad tables where vendors (mostly swim moms) hawk various swim team necessities from chocolate chip cookies to the requisite bananas and apples, to sandwiches and pizza, to racks of swimsuits, goggles, flannel pajama pants (the travel attire of choice for swimmer kids), car decals for swimmer families, and, of course, tee-shirts. As you may have guessed I am at a swim meet – my granddaughter’s.

                     

                                                Invitational Meet
The event here today is labeled “Go for the Gold.” It is classified as an Invitational Swim Meet, as opposed to Dual, two teams, Invitational, from my perspective, means you’re here for the long haul – a full day. 

                                                 Swimmer Gymnasts
  This is my first swim event as swimmer-grandpa. In a past life, a generation ago I was a “gymnastics dad” at a time before silhouette car decals of cart-wheelers were popular or even existed. My memory comes back now – “I Love Gymnastics” was the (only) bumper sticker preferred in my “gymnastics dad” years, the late 1970s, the Nadia years.  

       Actually it appears that kids still love gymnastics. Each corner of this gym today is packed with circles of small swimmer girls doing cart-wheels and round-offs in between their swim events. The gym floor is sprinkled with crumpled towels arranged by team. Intermittently an adult with a clipboard approaches a cluster of swimmer-gymnasts and dispenses essential information.

                                                  Long Haul Parents
       Waves of kids come and go here, first into the building, then incessantly back and forth from the pool to the gym. I move over to the pool area where races are grouped by age. Theoretically some waves should vanish as others appear, but this does not seem to be the case as the pool area crowd, if anything, grows. 

 

       There is much down time in large (invitational) swim meets for nine to twelve year olds.  Your child swims once – or twice, maybe three times – for a minute or two, whereas the meet itself - that’s a five hour event. Experienced parents prowl the hallway bending over the tables of swim gear and then moving along to check the time-sheets taped to the wall. In the pool area their seats are saved by piles of coats and towels. With them as well is a plethora of parent essentials. The most critical is the pass-the-time equipment  such as  fold-up chairs, books, newspapers, kindles, laptops, pencils, and also cameras, stop watches, meet programs and Speedo backpacks.  Some parents yell encouragement at their children as they glide by in the water, their shouts timed with the part of the stroke that brings the swimmers ears above water. It is my opinion that the swimming children are oblivious to this, but I am uncertain. Coaches, pacing at poolside, also offer vocal encouragement, their shouts also timed to match their swimmer’s breaths.

                                                    Pressurized Predicament                    
       I tell myself that the scene today is different from those “Nadia years” gymnastic days. But I am unsure about why. On the trip down this morning Emma (age 9), recognized her pressurized predicament just as my daughter Brett did in 1978. Emma was in the back seat as we rolled south on Interstate 287. She knew that she was on the swim team and despite the performance anxiety that she felt there was no turning back. She had no choice. Today I was driving my daughter’s SUV/Van. Thirty some years ago I was behind the wheel of my Datsun 210B hatchback with four nine year olds stretched horizontally in the way back. As the hatchback approached the gym I would say, “OK, here we are; this is the turn.” A chorus of voices would respond, “Keep going, we don’t want to go.” But they too knew that there was no fighting the inevitable. They were nine. This was life. They had no choice.

                                                       Body Art
       Another new twist today is that the swimmers write on their body with sharpies. Newcomers like Emma with a swim-mom-challenged mother do not know what to write – nor do I - so Emma draws a smiley face on her arm. I gaze around at the other participants. No other smiley faces. Most seem to have what looks like Chinese letters printed on their arms which appears to my unfocused eye like biker tattoos. Could it be?  I make it a point to decipher the body art. Finally I spy a serene looking kid and risk a question, “What did you write there?” I say to a girl standing with her mom.  It is not Asian writing.

She holds up her arm. I see tic-tac-toe-like lines with words and numbers – in English.

       “It’s my events,” the girl tells me and her mom smiles. I am happy I did not offend her, always a concern when a senior citizen encounters a young celebrity athlete. I do make out a few other body-ink inscriptions without help. “Eat my bubbles,” is a popular one for Emma’s team. It is written across their backs. Cute. 

                                                The Young and the Befuddled
       There are numerous grandparents here and to a person they seem especially befuddled, if not outright unhappy. Stuck in a traffic jam comes to mind. I think that the wet concrete bleacher seating may be an issue, as well as the muggy heat-wave-like weather in the pool area, which could be especially harsh on overly bundled seniors. But I may be projecting my own thinking on them. Honestly - I jest, because I am not unhappy, not at all. At age seventy this is my greatest joy, not so much the meet, nor the competition but just being around the happy kids, watching their enthusiasm whether they are cart-wheeling or paddling through water. And about the water - these young kids all go full force, up, back, up, back, four times – in practice, eight laps - slapping the water with a vengeance, kicking on and on without let up. I am overly impressed. Thankfully, it seems, there is not a heightened emphasis on winning, though I could be naive about that. In the meantime, knowing that Emma is part of this group, that she is such an athlete. Honestly, it warms my heart – immensely.        

I'm a novelist - August 2010

I'm a novelist  - August 2010

                

                It is 9 AM, my phone rings. It’s daughter, Ashley, from four blocks away.
           
                "Dad, can you come over?"

                "Yeah, what?" I say.

                "I’ve got to go into the school and I don’t want to bring Johnny."

                  It is mid-August and my teacher daughter wants to get her classroom ready for September  start of school. Johnny, age four, is known to be a bit of a thorn when there is work to do.

                "Yeah, OK, when? I’m busy at the moment," I say.

                "What are you doing?"

                "Stuff!"

                "Like what?"

                 "Stuff," I repeat.

                  "What?" says Ash.

                "Ash," I say, "I’m a novelist."

                "Yes we know. Can you put it aside for an hour or so and come over?"

                And so it is that over the years I have settled on the quip "I’m a novelist" when questioned
by one of my daughters, "Are you busy?"  It brings a chuckle, something that is enjoyed by all, and it more or less answers the "busy" question: "Yes, I am busy, and I know that you don’t consider my "work/hobby" real or important but nevertheless – I am a novelist, so I’m busy." Ha ha.

                 As you may have guessed, and before you ask what I have written, let me say that I’m not really a novelist, despite being infatuated with writing for much of my adult life. Should I mention my hobby to someone other than family they invariably ask, "Have you written anything?" They mean published anything.  It is only recently that I have settled on an answer, which is, "No, I just write as a hobby."

                 My hobby started some forty years ago, jotting observations, and thoughts that I wanted to keep, for later, when I might actually become a novelist. I wrote on odd slips of paper, grocery receipts, junk mail envelopes, napkins and the like, filing them in a manila folder labeled “Future.” Often there was an attempted every-man aspect to the observation, but how to express it or just what it was, I was unsure, much less how to connect it to a story theme. 

                What I would see was likely nothing more than the common sight of a man with lunch pail in hand and seemingly full of purpose, trudging off to work, hurrying across the railroad tracks before the gates came down, in Bethlehem, PA. There’s a story there I would think as I watched and I scribbled a note on the newspaper that lay on the passenger seat of my car – "man with lunch pail going to work at Bethlehem Steel Company." That newspaper was dated October 9, 1967.

                  Over time I accumulated many such notes, and subsequently lost many as well. It was years later that my newspaper note plus other jottings resurfaced in a mildewed box in my basement. Sitting there, on the cellar floor, alone, with my thoughts, I gathered the pack of scribbles in my hands and looked at them again. It was like looking at a pile of old computer punch cards that had spilled from a truck and being asked to organize them into proper order. What I thought might one day yield a treasure of profound ideas, I now saw as not that at all. I returned my writings to their time capsule and retraced my steps back to the real world, feeling more than a bit disappointed that my scribbles, saved all these years seemed to be worth nothing.

                 As time moved along I graduated from notes on newspapers and napkins to jottings in small spiral bound hand held notebooks, steno pad type. I misplaced or lost fewer of these, but the words, even the thoughts, seemed, sadly, to still lack poignancy, among other things. Later I went with bigger notebooks, 8-½ in. by 11 in., the black and white school days type. I told myself that when I filled one of these I would have written a book. I once read some encouraging words by Kurt Vonnegutt. Something to this effect: "Just write, don’t worry that it is not a masterpiece, write a bad book, but write." The big notebooks didn’t do the trick; they remained incomplete. I had yet to write my bad book.

                 It was the summer of 1981, when I filled my first seventy-two sheet University Notebook with generally unrelated drivel, but nevertheless, I felt a small sense of accomplishment. I told maybe one person about this and no one of course read it but me. It was something, - think journal or diary - but it didn’t rise to the level of the "bad book." Then I read a comment by renowned author Joseph Wambaugh that went something like this: "If you want to be a writer and you want to call yourself a writer, then you must write every day. Otherwise you just fool yourself." Wambaugh wrote a thousand words every day. He said that if you didn’t do something like that with a scheduled regularity, like daily, then you’re weren’t a writer." I got the message. I was not a writer, and not a novelist either.

                 But I persisted. In 1984 I graduated again to a new form, this time to those blank books that sold in stationary stores. I liked them. They looked like real books that one could place on a shelf. I thought that they gave credibility to the contents. I started with palm size and half filled a couple of them. Then during that summer, after school closed, I started a practice of going into a church every morning for meditation and prayer. At the same time I started to write into a larger, blank book - best-seller size - with a hard cover, loosely applying the theme of the morning prayer, and searching for meaning of life.

                 Yes, I know. Don’t laugh.

                 Eventually, by summer’s end, I filled the two hundred and sixteen pages (approximately 75 typewritten I would guess) with hand printed words. When people asked what I did over the summer I ventured that I had written a journal. Not a book yet, but I was telling people that I had written. Sometimes they asked what it was about and I didn’t know what to say, so I said "The influence of poetry on my life." There were a few pages related to poetry, but nothing profound. Thankfully, most people were kind enough not to pry further.

 
                  It’s hard to believe that was fifteen years ago (now 2023 - 39 years), because I thought that was the beginning of a consistent writing effort. Obviously it was not to be. I had made it to another level but I was still on the first floor, even lower.

                  Today it is the computer era, which has been very helpful. No more blank books. Instead I have word-processing files. These are much more manageable for a writer like me.  I am back to Wambaugh’s advice now, in this year before the millennium. I am trying to write my one thousand words and in the last ten days have fared as follows:

 

Day 1 - 1,150 words
Day 2 - 1,037 words - after two days, I’m moving right along here
Day 3 - 0 words - mowed lawn, got ready for garage sale
Day 4 - 0 words - Prepare for Garage sale      
Day 5 - 721 words
Day 6 - 0 words - Worked on [daughter] Ashley’s application for grant
                related to teaching job
Day 7 - 0 words - Worked on Ashley’s application
Day 8 - 0 words - Worked on Ashley’s application
Day 9 - 422 words - still working on Ashley’s application
Day 10-300 words

                 Clearly there is still a need for discipline, especially when presented with other tasks, all the normal stuff that gets done around the normal house, including homes of famous authors, but somehow doesn't interfere with the prioritized work (writing). Regardless, my problem with writing is not the interference of various household tasks, unless one considers daydreaming as a task. 

                  Regardless, my daughter has told me that I have too much junk around my house and that I need to have a garage sale. So I hop to it. I put the ad in the newspaper which commits me to a sale five days hence. "I don’t have time for this – garage sale. You know?" I say to my daughter, "being a novelist."
                  That excuse doesn’t work, but I used it, as mentioned above, when said daughter, Ash, asks for help composing a ten page application for some lottery-odds-teacher-of-the-year contest grant (see Day 6, 7, 8, 9 above).

                 "Come on Dad, you’re a writer," Ashley says.  I can’t say no. I give it four or five days. What I am is a slow writer.

                  This kind of thing happens to me at work also where I’m often called upon to write the words for various projects because most people now know that writing is my thing. I hate those projects and truthfully though I do bang out the words, more or less, they never seem to sound especially silken, and no one ever says, "That’s great, you’re a great writer." They just say thanks and more than a few times offer suggestions and spelling corrections.

                 Well, I never said that I was a good writer. Remember I’m trying to write a bad book. I honestly don’t think that I am a good writer; I know I’m not in fact. I’m just like the guy who plays golf every day, never breaks a hundred, but still loves to play golf. He’s a duffer and he knows he's a duffer. I’m a duffer of a writer who wants to "play" every day, but doesn’t always get to it because well -life gets in the way sometimes. 

 

Plus, I think I have ADHD.