A word after a word
After a word is power.
Margaret Atwood, “Spelling”
May 26, 2020
On a dark and stormy night in a crumbling world, I stumbled upon a forgotten blog post dated nearly one year in the past.
(It wasn’t stormy, actually – I think I’ve heard thunder in California precisely twice. But it was dark, and the world was indeed crumbling, which explained the glass of wine I was drinking, which explained why I was thinking seriously about starting a blog, before remembering I had already started a blog some time ago.)
The words stared accusingly from the laptop screen, promising that they weren’t mad at me, just disappointed. Words that were written in a house nearly 3,000 miles away, in what feels like another life. I leave them here for your perusal.
August 11, 2019
My mother is sick.
She’s the kind of sick where you don’t want to deny any request to the person in question. The kind of sick where, when she says she misses the days when you used to write new stuff all the time, and shouldn’t you really start a blog of your own, and how happy it would make her if you did, you say yes. Even though the thought makes you seize up inside, you start a damn blog.
But don’t worry — this isn’t going to be one of those “my mom has Stage 4 cancer and I’m going to write about that a lot because aren’t I so deep now” blogs.
I used to write all sorts of things: songs, plays, stories dreamt in great detail then hastily abandoned, terrible (and I do mean TERRIBLE) poetry. Then I stopped. Maybe it’s time to try again. Let’s see what happens.
May 26, 2020
And there you have it, dear reader. A ghost version of myself, speaking from the past. What happened, of course, is absolutely nothing, and that should give you some indication of my ability to follow through on personal projects.
My mother is still sick, but not AS sick. And she is still, thank everything holy, very much alive. And she is still bugging me to start a blog so that she can read my writing from the other side of the country, now that I’m no longer her live-in nurse.
The rest of the world is also sick. Not just metaphorically sick, but dying from a crafty new virus that scientists are scrambling to understand and Americans seem determined to ignore. The loss and terror are overwhelming, and I can’t do much to change that. But I can try to keep my promise to my mother.
Since writing those words, I have fulfilled a lifelong dream by landing a job at a children’s bookstore, begun graduate study to become a librarian, and read lots and lots and lots of books. I hope to write my thoughts about those books (and anything else that happens to lodge in my brain) here. I hope that the three or so people reading this blog will enjoy said thoughts.
Let’s dive in.
Bookshelves & Babble 