A Shoe, A Bucket of Water, and a Lion

I haven't managed to get to the bucket of water or the lion yet...

It sat in the back under a pile of other items that had been discarded. It was old and wrinkled, stained with use and yellow with age. Many years of foot odor, medicated powers, dust and, more recently, rodent droppings had given it a distinctly unpleasant smell and a sour disposition. It resented its condition and longed for the day when it would no longer be pressed down by the weight of broken toys, discarded clothes and water-logged textbooks.

Sometimes when it was being chewed by a mouse searching for nesting materials, the shoe would dream of the day when it would be thrown out, taken to the dump and incinerated. Its sole was loose anyway, painfully pulling away from its body. The complete release would be momentarily painful but, the shoe believed, the joy of the separation would be well worth the one brief stab of pain.

It was a melancholy shoe with little life remaining.

Time passed and the junk pile shifted. The shoe felt a breath of moving air and a shock of realization. It was out of the pile and the closet door was open. A glimmer of hope began to pulse in its insole, but the shoe ignored it. Hope is an illusion, it thought curmudgeonly.

The shoe could hear faint noises in the room beyond the closet. There was the sound of wood scraping; a chair or stool was being moved across the floor. Footsteps moved in an out of the room. A window opened, and a broom was put to use. Cautiously, the shoe peered out of the closet. It couldn't see much, but it was obvious that the room was being cleared out and cleaned up.

The shoe wondered if the closet would be cleaned as well. There was no reason that it should be ignored. At last, thought the shoe, the junk pile will be thrown out!

As that thought struck, the she experienced a tingling sensation running up and down its laces. A knot of fear formed just above its aglets and lodged between its tongue and eyelets. In a shock of uncharacteristic shoelessness, it realized it was going to die - and it wasn't ready.

Writing this morning

I think there is more to come on this particular vein...

In the preternatural moments before sunrise, the world is hushed as a faint glow begins to illuminate the mountains. It is a sacred moment observed by every living thing, and one who listens with more than their ears can feel the reverence that even the inanimate rocks give to this special moment. A deep breath of a cool and silent wind lessens, but does not break, the silence, and the slight rustle of pine needles stirs the soul to even more awe at this magnificent moment: the birth of a new day.

Suddenly, roaring into the sky as if this moment was created expressly for this purpose, a dragon rises up. He is racing the sun, competing for a glory it has always had and that he will never achieve. His serpentine form mars the light, and his roar scatters the silence like a wolf among sheep. In his roar is the desperation of one who offers a protection he cannot give; he tries to show that the strength of sound is more solid than the peace of silence.

He looks down into the forest from the peak of the mountain and seems to see all. He climbs higher into the sky, parallel with the rays of the rising sun, and sees a woman, sitting in a clearing. He sees that her eyes are closed, her face turned up to the sun. She seems oblivious to his intrusion, and he is enraged that she seems to find peace in the simple act of sitting and listening to the trees. He wheels through the air toward her, knowing he cannot land in that clearing but somehow hoping he can ruin her peace by blotting out the sun with his mighty wings. He spreads his pinions wide, slowing his flight and casting his insubstantial shadow into the clearing. He looks into the face of the woman and sees no fear; her eyes have not opened and not a single hair on her head has been moved by his greatness.

His wounded pride feeding his rage, the dragon circles over the clearing. He does not breathe fire and he cannot truly harm the woman: all the more reason for his rage and its inefficacy. He knows, though, that if he can but find a way to distract her for a moment from the glory of the rising sun and the peace around her, he can spew forth doubt and darkness, disturbing her peace with uncertainty and despair. He vows that this woman, more than all other creatures under the sun, will feel his might and his majesty. She will worship HIM, and him only. The warmth of the rising sun may daily touch her face, but he promises to himself that once he succeeds, it will never again touch her heart. She will never again know the peace of the sunrise.

The Southeast Corner

In the southeast corner on the third floor of a block of condominiums in Salt Lake, there is a small bedroom. In the southeast corner of that bedroom, there is a twin bed where a fleece throw and a flat sheet intertwine in a crumpled mess. On top of that mess is a neatly folded set of nightclothes. All of these things belong to the young woman who slouches against a few pillows on the southeast corner of the bed. She is typing away at her computer, a movie paused behind her word processing software.

There are four bookcases in the room, and each one houses a variety of books, music CDs, and DVDs. The books outnumber the movies and music by at least three to one, and several more books are hidden in various locations around the room. They wait for their mistress to straighten things up and find them a home with the other books.

Four boxes are stacked near the closet, and two plastic crates. Several more crates sit in the trunk of a car outside. These are full of papers and files, most of which relate to her teaching career. Mixed into all of the articles on multicultural diversity and research based instruction are documents that are almost unnoticeable but are far more valuable than all the rest. They are the workings of a human mind, and show how years of education can expand or restrict the creativity and humanity of a young girl.

She is approaching the culmination of her Master’s degree and contemplating the pursuit of a Doctorate. She is shifting her talents from the field of education to the field of psychology, moving away from the teaching of information and processes to teaching that will help adolescents find self-fulfillment. She also expects that she will find self-fulfillment in this change of careers, for her love of academics has given way to a love of humanity.

She feels hopeless to help individuals find their way through a sea of legislative requirements that flood the curriculum. As a teacher she is continually sinking below the waves. How can she buoy up others when she is scarcely able to draw breath? The stories of her students’ lives are reduced to test scores and arguments about what kids today need to know. So many adults put in their oars that the children are more often pushed away from lifeboats than pulled in close to the ships that sail these waters, for a child’s greatest strengths are not often valued by the adults who try and direct their lives.

This young woman has great faith in the resilience of humankind, and that the indomitable human spirit will thrive even when it is undernourished. It is the children who will not let politics and circumstance keep them down who keep the world afloat; those children always seem to achieve their dreams. In her enthusiasm to encourage all children to develop their talents, however, she has lost sight of her own dreams. Her altruism has squelched her personal ambitions, and she feels empty as she strives to live up to the impossible standards set by parents, principals, communities, and civic leaders. How can she encourage others to develop their talents when hers rust on a shelf while she plans lesson after lesson and grades paper after paper?

To be a teacher takes inhuman ability to plan, prepare, and adapt. Preparation almost always takes place during personal time; teachers are paid to teach but not to plan. It takes time to rejuvenate and to spark creativity, and when personal time is spent performing professional duties, personal talents wither. The spark is going out for this young woman, and she knows that she will drown with her students if she does not find her own life preserver.

She feels trapped. Trapped and drowning. The thing that she really needs, that she really wants, is escape. Not just a weekend off, and not just another summer break full of graduate classes, seminars, workshops, and the inevitable laziness for a few unstructured weeks as she struggles to suppress her sense of adventure for the sake of her credit score. Her teacher’s salary and student loans leave her incapable of traveling far, and she would feel more trapped to rely on her credit excellent credit and sink further into debt. She dreams of travel, and of the possibility that someone might believe in her as much as she believes in her students.

She wants to travel; she wants to write. She wants to grow, live, learn and experience the world beyond the bounds of her childhood home. She wonders if the energy of New York City would drain or stimulate her. She is curious as to how awed she would be by the history and landscape on the British Isles. She wants to taste real French cuisine and walk down the streets of Paris and through the chateaux built in the Loire valley. She speculates at to how much she looks like a German, for it is from Germany that many of her ancestors immigrated. Italy and Greece have influenced her country and her dreams, with their historic democracies, architectural wonders, and polytheistic mythologies.

She longs to feel awkward and out of place in the countries of the Middle East, to listen as the call to prayer echoes through cities full of dust and exotic smells. The stories she has heard from others make her wonder if her American boldness would be too bold for a female in such places. How many myths and stereotypes would be revealed if she lived in such a place? The fighting in Africa is worrisome, but the savannahs and veldts; the rainforests and deserts; the ancient cities and proud people of that continent lure her.

Russia would certainly be a different experience; she wonders what the people there are like. The traditions of China and Japan, their deep respect and reverence for their ancestors, brings her shame as she realizes how little knowledge she has of her own ancestors and lineage. Some of her family lives in Australia, and she would like to know how the different cultures on that continent interact. She’d like to experience the climate and geography there as well; the beauty of nature in all parts of the world is an almost irresistible lure to someone who never tires of the changing light on the mountains in her own home.

To travel takes money. To read and write take time. Such simple pleasures as writing and dreaming are too often denied to this young woman. They are stifled by her own sense of responsibility, her practicality, and a mind that becomes increasingly logical. Her dreams become restricted as she tries to balance them with a reality that is full of both beauty and disappointment. One who dares not dream about her future is often afraid to dream about other worlds or imagine fictional characters into being. Such dreaming stimulates her desires for adventure and romance – desires that cannot be satisfied.

She sits instead, in the corner on the bed in the southeast corner of the southeast condo on the third floor of a complex in Salt Lake City; not daring to dream, not daring to act, not daring to hope, and only for a moment daring to write.

Five Words on a Card

One strategy for helping kids become writers is to give them five words on a card and have them work those five words into a story. I've been doing this with my sixth graders, but it's five card draw from a MadLibs card game.
The words today were: choirboys, heartless, computers, romance and cell phones. Here's what I came up with:

It was quiet in the Nave. The choirboys had left their seats only moments before, and the rest of the cathedral personnel were in their offices, filing papers and shutting down computers. The visitors were gone for the day as well; the silence would not be broken by the loud chatter of tourists, the squeals of small children, or the buzzing of cell phones.
A darkened cathedral was a good place for romance to come alive. The soaring buttresses and the dim, colored illumination from stained glass windows lent a certain kind of gloom to the Gothic structure's interior. It was a gloom that reflected true romance, the feeling that something supernatural was going to happen at any moment.
"I wouldn't be surprised to see a ghost," thought the heartless man who was the sole occupant of the gradually darkening room.
The echo of a footfall reverberated suddenly from the back of the room, traveled to the front, then slowly slipped and slid up to the ceiling, around the room, and back to its originator. By the time the echo faded, the cold figure in black had slipped silently into the shadows.


:) My students are amazed that I don't know who this heartless man is, or what is going to happen next. Even I kind of want to know where this story is going. That, I think, it was a good fiction writer does: discovers stories rather than creating them.