My Back Yard

Back on January 2002 my goals were:

1)  Improve my relationships with others, both at work and outside

2)  Get my sleep back on track 

3) Take care of myself through exercise, eating right, not overworking

4) Be creative

5) Get my finances in order

I have achieved reasonable progress on numbers 1, 2, 4 and 5 for the time being. As for number 3, I’m not overworking. That ended when I left the corporate world. As for exercise and eating, I’m making progress.

It’s nice to see I’m making progress. 

"Of all the devices that can add humanity to your writing, the direct quotation is the most overused," according to Jack Hart, author of A Writer’s Coach: An Editor’s Guide to Words That Work.

 In his book he cites four questions that reporter Isabel Wilkerson asks herself:

• Does the quote move the story along? Is it an integral part of the story? What happens to the story if you take it out? Does it fit seamlessly into the story?

• Does it focus, sharpen, and strengthen the section of the story it is in, or merely repeat something?

  * Does it say it better than the reporter can paraphrase it?

  * Does it provide facts and facts alone? If so, paraphrase. Critical information should not be conveyed in quotes.

    

This makes me think I use quotes too liberally in my magazine stories.

I think these questions could also apply to dialogue in fiction. Do you agree?

I also want to consider Hart’s "Five Ways to Make Your Writing More Colorful." 

1. "Get in touch with yourself. Pay close attention to how you feel when you enter a room, meet a person, or watch an event. then work back to the specific details–sights, sounds, smells, tastes–that produced your most emotional response. Jot them down. then pass the most powerful along to readers in a description of what you experienced."

   2. "Pick three. Describe characters by using the three details that most typify them…."

   3. "Work backward. Think about the central point–the theme statement–of something you’re about to write. then ask yourself what specific details would serve as good evidence for that assertion…."

   4. "Play the simile game. Train your figurative ear…. Point to a random object and create a comparison. ‘That fireplug looks like a second-grade crossing guard.’ ‘That streaked concrete looks like the winner’s shirt at a watermelon eating contest.’ "

   5. "Count for color. Metaphors, similes, and other figurative devices work best when you measure them out carefully…."  

Sorry about the formatting problem with numbering and bullet points. I can’t fix it.

I’m still getting compliments on my hamstrings.

As I grow older, I have to stretch farther for compliments. So I’m happy that my hamstrings remain flexible. I can touch my toes and keep on going.

Yesterday my personal trainer said there’s no sense in having me do hamstring stretches because I’m already so flexible.

I believe I was born this way, so I can’t take credit for it. 

Checked the website before I left home.

No service alerts on the train from Worcester

bound for Boston.

So what’s this on the red electric sign board?

CSX construction delays.

Five to 10 minutes.

I’m sceptical.  Sometimes

on or near schedule

stretches into half-hour delay.

It’s so cold.

I place a section of 

newspaper on the bench

before plopping down.

Breathe in, breathe out.

There’s nothing I can do to speed the train.

Enjoyed unscheduled time.

Let my mind rove. 

Stab it with your pen.

Kill it before it spreads.

There’s no place for anger 

that colors the world with blood.

Breathe deeply.

Clear your mind.

Peace will come. 

The first line comes from a poem by Lady Wordsmith, one of the participants in this week’s PoetryThursday.

You can read Michael Stelzer’s list of candidates for the best 10 books for writers.

I especially like William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.

I am 142 lbs. closer to my goal of a peaceful home.

That’s the total weight of the six cardboard boxes of books that an academic librarian is picking up from my house tomorrow morning. They’re mostly books that I collected for my dissertation research, so I feel things about these books.

But they were just gathering dust in my basement. They want to be read. I think most of them will achieve that. The librarian told me that they’ll select the books they want, then share the rest with other libraries.

It would even be fine with me if they gave the leftovers to students. 

I’ve got homework for my online business class, listing my values in the four areas below. Somehow it seems as if I didn’t come up with enough.

MY GREATEST ASPIRATIONS

Be the best possible wife, relative, friend, colleague.

Be the best possible writer and help others achieve their writing goals.

Be remembered after I die. 

Write words that resonate and perhaps even offer comfort to others.

Be creative. 

MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE WORLD

As I said above, be the best possible wife, relative, friend, colleague

Go back to doing some sort of meaningful volunteer work, instead of just volunteer work that’s professionally useful.

MY DUTY

Turn in good work on time.

Provide good value for my fees.

Earn money. 

Pull my weight within my marriage. 

Exceed expectations, when possible.

MY WEAKNESSES

My parents measured success in money and things. Even though I disagree in principle, I can’t help feeling the more I earn, the better I am.

I need recognition and praise.

I’m a slob. I don’t like putting things away or cleaning. 

I’m not as assertive as I should be in my marketing. 

I had an idea. If I researched my family’s history, maybe I could figure out why my family is as crazy as it is. Or at least I could figure out how my mother and father were related.

I want to reassure you. My mother and father weren’t blood relatives. But they were related even before they got married. My mother’s father’s sister (her aunt) married my father’s father’s brother (his uncle). Got it?

It appears that the women of my mother’s clan had a weakness for MBY men. Or perhaps my great-aunt’s example influenced my mom. I learned that my great-aunt Ida had journeyed from South Africa to visit relatives in the U.S., met her MBY man, and stayed in the U.S. to marry him and raise a family here. My mom did the same. In fact, she even met my father at her aunt’s house during her visit from South Africa.

The meeting between my mom and dad took place during a 1940s thaw in the two families’ relationships, which I discussed earlier.  In fact, my mother’s wedding announcement refers to "the bride’s aunt … who wore black crepe."Some relatives say my mother’s aunt was "like a mother to her."

But here’s where the craziness comes in. Before long my parents and my aunt broke off their relationship.  She was my mother’s closest blood relative in the U.S. But their relationship ended even as my parents lived less than 20 miles away.

I met my great-aunt Ida once, when my parents took me into her store. I must have seen the taxidermied bear that impressed other relatives who visited that establishment. But what stuck in my mind instead was that she gave me $5. Or rather, she handed it to my mother for safekeeping. I never saw it again. $5 seemed like an immense sum of age at age five.

Anyway, how could my mom go from love to no contact with her aunt? And how could I do the same with my father? 

"What does and what doesn’t it mean to be my father’s son? Six months after his death, I struggle with the haunting sense that I am fated to live his life over again rather than my own."

These lines by Mark Schafer, a literary translator and visual artist, got me thinking about how his words apply to me and my late father.

In breaking off all correspondence with my father more than a decade ago, I did something very characteristic of the folks who bear his last name. I cut myself off from my kin.

The Mby family has broken off family relationships for at least 50 years. I didn’t learn this until one summer in Maine on a boatyard dock.  "This is my cousin," said my father gesturing toward a man wearing boat sneakers like the rest of us. The whole encounter lasted no more than five minutes.

I later heard from my father’s sister that the relationships soured over the division of a family business after bankruptcy in the Great Depression of the 1930s. They visited with one another during the 1940s. That’s how my father and mother met.