Springtime in November

A good night's sleep and a better outlook for my day. It seems as though a lot has happened in my mind since yesterday. I gave more things more thought than I have in a long time. Don't get me wrong. It was by means a productive day. I did not paint the house. I didn't plant a winter garden. But I did think about a lot of things.

After finishing my blog entry yesterday, I began working on a story, which quickly turned into a character and a character that I've been thinking about on some level most of my life.

I began by reading up quickly on the three act structure and then I thought, in order to get back into writing a bit, I'll write a short story, a short play, with a three act structure. As short as I can make it. Maybe a sentence or two per act. Just to get the scent back into my head again. So I began with a man looking down at a body on the ground and wondering what he should do. My first idea was to have him chicken out and make the coward's choice. This is something I'm well versed in. Then his conscience begins to work on him. Once again, as I write this, it seems like a great beginning to a story. Oh, wait, I was going to try to write it in a noir style, as well.

One thing led to another and the story and premise grew as I tried to build the structure before I began the fun of writing. Suddenly I was looking up pictures of Kansas City in the 1950's. It wasn't far from there to looking for newspaper sellers on the corners of big cities. This isn't the first time I looked for that online. It was one of those touchstones of my youth.

I'd go to KC with my mom on one of her shopping safaris and we'd move through the city like a machine. She had a list and a time frame and away we'd go. At some point, we'd end up downtown in the great city and I'd remember being swept along behind her, in her wake, Never getting too far away from her, and watching everything around me. Looking at the city and the people as if I were on an alien planet with a limited supply of oxygen. Taking it all in as quickly and thoroughly as I could. Like I was going to have to make a report about it, to the Society, when we got back to earth.

One of the things I saw was the abundance of people who would never fit in anywhere else. It was a freak show, a tour of human curiosities. While I stood out as a limping, pitiable character in my little town of Leavenworth, in Kansas City, the only people who ever looked twice at me were the cripples and mentally defective people. We recognized each other, I think. I even remember getting tagged and waved on by a woman on the sidewalk downtown. This woman was obviously in one of the "other" categories. At first I was alarmed when it happened and as I moved away from her in the stream of people, I realized I was in no danger there. But I was wrong about that too. I had no understanding of where I lived let alone where and how she lived.

Anyway, one of the people I always kept an eye peeled for, was the men without legs that moved along the streets or sat on the corner selling news papers. Some of them sat in padded small fruit boxes with casters on the bottom that helped them move along the sidewalks. Others had thick pads of leather strapped somehow to where their legs would have been and they moved by planting their gloved fists on the hard ground in front of them and swinging their shortened bodies forward between their arms, as if their arms were crutches. I think most of these men had no legs. They were either born that way, or some accident of the world or their birth had caused that loss. These men were doing all they could to go on surviving in the harsh urban environment. It must have been horrible for them and I always wondered about their stories. How does one become a legless human on the cold hard dirty floor of the busy city? What strength does it take to go on there and not give up? Disadvantaged but not at all weak. What kept them alive? How do you cope with the cosmic unfairness of being thrown down there? Discarded but refusing to go down the drain.

So that's the story, or, rather, that's the character I thought of. Ignore that character if you can. I dare you. Not that I could ever represent to know what that man thought or felt, but I thought that if I were to write one story and put everything into it, that would be the one.

So now I know what I have to write and want to write. Now I can work on that in my spare moments in between everything else.

Oh, I also decided to try painting in the impressionist style.

More later,