What I've Been Doing Instead of Writing, Halloween Craft Edition

I’ve watched some soccer and started teaching an adult literacy class. But mostly I’ve been working on Sonar Halloween costumes. Please click to embiggen any photo.

Last year Sonar X11 was a headless guy. This year he started with a conceptual costume, “The Balance of the Universe,” but may transform this piece into a black and white jester or clown. Oh, and no, I didn’t do this. He is eleven and needs me only to run the sewing machine from time to time.

Sonar X11’s Halloween maskLast year Sonar X8 was Gimli the Dwarf. This year, continuing the martial fantasy theme in a slightly different direction, he wants to be Sir Lancelot. He made the sword. This one gets to reuse the Santa boots that Sonar X11 wore in third grade. En garde, villein. 

Sonar X8’s Knight of the Round TableLast year Sonar X6 was a recycled Harry Potter, so this year he wanted something splashy. I balked at the Instructable for the Indiana Jones Lego Minifig, but we came to a compromise: regular minifig, built my way. We still need to cut out the face so he can see when he wears it.

Sonar X6’s Lego Minifig headThe primary materials here are two pool noodles and an empty oatmeal container. Plus some yellow sheets of foam and a good amount of duct tape.

The guts of Sonar X6’s lego minifig costume piecesWe spent Sunday morning goring up the front of the house. We inherited the grave stones from awesome neighbors (I think they’ve been pictured here before), but the bloody paint sheets are ours. The cheerful mums are for irony, of course. Not pictured is the entire scene backlit by a red porch light in the dark, a smoke machine, and a Sonar dispatched behind a sheet to surprise passersby.

Instant graveyardVisitors must pass through the bloody plastic to get to the front door. Plus mums.One view from the front door. The little guy makes a lot of noise. 

Flashback: a Memory of Matches

From deep in the layers of the Not-A-Journal, I unearthed this bit of a memory about matches. So, you know, I’ve clearly been playing with matches for a long time. 

***

Among my earliest memories is being in my grandmother’s house, mainly in the basement. Imagine the Brady Bunch house, and you’ll get a sense of the general style and open feel of my grandmother’s house at the time. With the big bar and the big fireplace. The fireplace was an intense affair, dominating one end of the basement den. I remember a Christmas tree. I remember sitting under the tree at one end of the fireplace hearth with one of my aunts. We were using silly putty or something to lift a newsprint image of Jiminy Cricket (I loved that cricket) and put it on a rock. The rock was eventually coated in clear nail polish and lived in one of my drawers. Jiminy gave me a smile and a whistle whenever I looked at it.

In the same place, but perhaps at a different time, I remember using a gadget that rolled old newspapers into fireplace logs. I always wanted to turn the crank on that log-roller. I’m not sure how well those newspaper logs burned, but they were no doubt lit by the incredibly, mind-bogglingly, long wooden fireplace matches kept in a box way up on the mantle where I could not reach them.

That part is a lie. The part where the matches were up high. That’s my mommy-eye remembering. *I* would keep the matches up high. But this memory lives in the 1970s, in a house with broad-open stairs and no baby gates. Grandma’s cigarettes and lighter were always sitting on some nearby table. So I don’t really know if the long matches were up out of my reach. Maybe I could reach them. Could feel their brittle length and their splinters. Smell the tips ready to ignite with the right friction. Knowing that those sticks could bring fire out of the air with its crackling golden light and heat. 

Bobby Pins in the Desert

I leaned over the sink and ate cake with my fingers. I listened as Jeff Buckley broke my heart again with that final kiss in “Last Goodbye.” I was alone in the house for the first time since May.

Ideas were tripping over each other, clamoring for my attention, but mostly I was thinking about writing, specifically about my writing practice. About when and how to get my butt in the seat and keep it there long enough to put down coherent ideas. I was thinking about inspiration. Not the inspiration for stories, but motivational inspiration, like Sugar’s exhortation to write like a motherfucker.

This summer Partner read a leadership development book called The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. I have no idea whether the book is worthwhile or not (I didn’t read it), but one bit has stuck with both of us, not just because it is something that we have always done well, but also because it is something we must continue to do.

Ritualize what’s important.

Want to remember to floss more often? Do it at the same time every day. Make it part of a dental hygiene routine. Want to get more exercise? Make a ritual out of it by incorporating exercise time into the patterns of your day. Want to write a book that others will enjoy reading? You get the idea. First, figure out what’s important to you, and then incorporate actions into the day in such a way that you don’t have to waste time choosing to do them. You just do them. Ritually.

My favorite rituals in our house surround bedtime. There are bedtime jobs, a fixed list of things that the kids do automatically (if noisily), like dental care and pet care and putting together their launch pad for the next morning. Once the jobs are done, we settle together on the couch and I read to them. Lately they’ve started knitting while they listen to me. The routine has evolved as their needs and abilities have changed, but the central actions are familiar, and at least for me, comforting in their regularity.

Around the time Partner was reading the leadership book and we were discussing how we could adapt and expand our rituals to emphasize what’s important for us, we wandered into an odd place called Tinkertown. Many things affected me there, as I mentioned in my post about the place back in June. One thing stuck in my brain and has floated the surface almost every day since then. I’d like to say it was one of the quirky displays in the ad hoc museum, but it was actually a cheap, mass-produced trinket in the gift shop. These tiny wooden boxes, called Dream Boxes. Their explanation suggested that if you had a goal or a dream to accomplish, you could write that goal on a scrap of paper and put it in the box. Then each night before sleep, you could read the note. The practice, the instructions claimed, would help the dream become a reality. A reminding ritual.

What would you write on the scrap of paper in your Dream Box, sweet peas? I’m writing mine now.

My Geography

I love the mountain forests. They are pretty, comfortable, a break from the flat expanses of our coast. But still somehow foreign. I’d dare to say alien, but we are too close to Roswell to use that metaphor without any irony.

When we drive down out of the mountains, an internal syncopation with the trees falls silent. The high desert unfolds around me, and I feel a new rhythm, pulsing in harmony with something inside me. I glance back at the mountains in the distance. Past the tumbleweeds and dry grass to the mesas and ridges and peaks. I look forward to the rolling desert. 

The green and blue I see in the distance are illusions. Those are shadow colors playing through the brittle brown valleys. Seussian yucca flowers dried upon their stalks dance along the edges of the road, bent like Kokopelli the trickster, blowing their pipes. A song to lead me home.

Paging Sancho Panza

I am fascinated by fields of wind turbines. Over the past few years, we have watched the assembly of dozens of them along our horizon. The pieces are unloaded from giant cargo ships onto eighteen-wheeled trucks — the propeller blades longer than the trucks. Surely, I think to myself when I see the turbines idle, surely, nothing could make those great beasts move. Nothing, of course, but the sea breeze. 

They are simple machines, these wind turbines. A post, an axis, and a three-armed propeller. They are elegant and powerful. Driving by them yesterday I wanted to measure their speed, to count their revolutions per minute, or perhaps more narcissistically to count their revolutions per my mile on the highway. I wasn’t driving and didn’t have a watch, so I just watched them spin, faster than I ever imagined, their titan blades slicing the blue sky. 

Passing back through the wind farm in the dark, I was struck by the absolute precision of the blinking red lights on every turbine. Dozens of them, as many as I could hold in my field of vision, blinked their horizontal red lights on and off in perfect unison from the tops of their towers. I wanted a picture of the lights right then, a way to hold that image in my hand. I wanted a photograph of the turbines in the dark. I suppose that might be a stupid photo, a dark skyline, the lights of Corpus Christi on the horizon, a smattering of red dots. 

I can’t articulate exactly what I want to capture in that photograph - the unity, the swinging power of the great blades in the dark. I know a photo doesn’t capture sound, and I couldn’t hear them over the road noise, but I wanted the photo to capture the sound I knew they were making, their great whump or whoosh. I can’t articulate how I would take that photo or why I want it.

Only that I do.