The boy saw his youngest sister reaching for the handle. The pot of soup was threatening to boil over on the front burner of the stove. His mother had told him a thousand times, “You must always turn the handle away from the edge, because otherwise your little sisters will try to grab them, and then they’ll spill hot stuff all over themselves. So it is very important for you to turn the handle the right way.” It was only decades later that he thought about how much responsibility that was to place on the shoulders of an 11-year-old boy, even if he was tall enough to use the stove, and responsible enough to be trusted with cooking for the family, and handy enough in the kitchen not just to open up and prepare canned soups, but also to cook some simple recipes. So he was always very careful to keep the pot handles parallel to the edge of the stove when he stood cooking in front of it, and to turn them another forty-five degrees away from the edge if he ever had to step away from the stove—but never for more than a moment.
But the babysitter was not as careful, even though she was 17 and should have known better, so sometimes he had to be careful for her, turning the handles to a safe position when she stepped away to answer the phone and to have long, giggling conversations with her boyfriend or one of her girlfriends from school about boys and songs on the radio and hair and makeup and teachers. But this time he was not watching, he was in the family room in front of the television, and he wasn’t supposed to have to take care of his sisters, that’s what the babysitter was for, but even though he was mostly paying attention to an episode of Star Trek that he’d seen seven or eight times already, in the back of his mind he knew that something wasn’t right, and he could smell the canned beef stew cooking, and he could hear it bubbling on the stove, and then in a moment he was seized by the vision of his youngest sister, the one who had recently become very curious about the universe of things above her head, and he could see her standing in front of the stove and looking up at the rattling pot and wondering what to make of the bubbles of stew starting to splash over the edge of the pot, and he could see her reaching for the handle, and he could see her pulling the boiling liquid over, spilling it on her face and neck and arms and screaming with pain and fear while the babysitter stood transfixed in shock or panic or disbelief, so he jumped up from the carpeted floor and ran into the kitchen and turned the handle on the pot away from the edge, and then he stormed into the hall, grabbed the phone out of the hand of the surprised babysitter, slammed it down on the receiver, and stood rooted to the floor in front of her, his face red with rage, angry tears streaming down his face.
Note: The prompt for this exercise was to write a text that “starts with someone reaching for something.” I had a lot of trouble with this one, maybe because it was the next one up when Hurricane Ike came along, so I tried several false starts at moments when focus was somewhat lacking. I finally cranked out this mostly stream-of-consciousness piece to get past the roadblock.
This is a warning from your future self. Ignore it at your peril.
I’m afraid you probably will ignore it, because you aren’t looking for advice. You’re looking for absolute answers, and you have some very limited ideas about where to look for them. You will not find any of the answers that I can give you in the places you’re comfortable looking.
There is so much I could tell you, but what I wish for …more
I don’t know a whole lot about my lineage. It seems safe to say that my family didn’t come over on the Mayflower, or I would probably have heard about it, right? From the little information we have, it’s more likely that most of my ancestors came to the New World much more recently, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On an encouraging note, that means my family is probably off the hook for ever having owned any African slaves. I’m told that my niece and nephew, however, are related by way of my brother-in-law’s family to Jefferson Davis. But that’s their karmic burden to work out. As for us Gumnicks, it’s more probable that our ancestors were somebody else’s slaves—or “serfs,” as they were called back when European white people owned …more
“We never ask for the things we need the most.” I don’t know if I agree with that statement, so what am I going to do with it? If we’re in touch with who we are, we do ask for the things we need the most. But I guess a lot of people go through life without asking. Who is this “we”?
—
“We never ask for the things we need the most,” she said to me.
“What do you mean by that?” I said.
“I mean, we say we want independence, but what we want is financial security. We say we want justice, but we’d …more
I showed up for my appointment at four o’clock. They kept me in the waiting room a little longer than usual. My favorite nurse looked apprehensive when she came to escort me back to an examining room.
“Mr. Raymond, I’ll need you to strip down to your underwear and put on this gown,” she said. She made no eye contact.
“What’s with the ‘Mister Raymond,’ Jennifer? I thought we were on a first-name basis.”
“I’m sorry, Mister— I’m sorry, Jack,” she said. “I have a lot …more
“I can’t set foot in the place,” Milla said. “I don’t think I ever will again.”
I was only trying to make small talk when I had asked her about the Sunrise Cafe, the tawdry-looking diner across the street from where we sat sipping lattes at the Golden Spoon. I was waiting for the waitress to bring me a cheese danish. Milla was avoiding carbs today, so she hadn’t ordered anything but the coffee.
“Everything in my entire life since that moment has been colored by what happened there,” she told me. She shifted in her seat and stared into …more
One Christmas season I drew my
big brother’s name out of the pot.
He was a fisherman; he decorated
his half of the room we shared
in eclectic Field & Stream motif.
Naturally, I shopped a sporting goods
store in search of the perfect gift.
My knowledge of fish and my interest
in fishing began and ended with threading
half of a squirming earthworm onto
a rusty hook and dangling it in the water
weighed down by a soft clump of lead
under a red and white plastic bobber.
(I thought of myself as a purist.)
I knew in the abstract that one could
angle for largemouth bass or smallmouth
bass or brook trout or rainbow trout or
any desired species in creek or lake
or stream, but I had no patience for the art
and science of attracting and catching
anything without a taste for worms.
So I selected a jar of fluorescent
orange roe. I imagined the plump,
squishy balls looked delicious to fish.
I also picked a gorgeous lure, an oval
of convex stainless steel painted in faux
fishy stripes and spots of red enamel,
a beauty to win a fish’s heart.
Note: The prompt for today was to describe someone who was “as close as a blood relative,” though not related. I decided to go in another direction.
“I’m sorry you are so afraid, honey, but everything is going to be okay.” My mother kneaded the back of my neck with her right hand. The knuckles of the left one looked white compared to the tan vinyl that covered the steering wheel. We must have been sitting in Dad’s old Plymouth. It was my first day of kindergarten. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I should ask Dad about that old car. What was the model? How long did he drive it? I think he sold it for scrap when I was about eight.
—
I almost couldn’t believe it, but Dad said that …more
My family was baptized into life in Houston on June 15, 1976—the only time in history that a game at the Astrodome was ever rained out. In the early afternoon, a storm dropped almost 13 inches of water on the city in about three hours. Flooding and traffic were so bad that the players couldn’t make it to the legendary domed stadium, much less the fans. We didn’t know that factoid until much later. The news the next day focused, of course, on the eight lives lost and on the damage to the Texas Medical Center and several of the city’s art museums.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. My story starts earlier in the day, on the last leg of a four-day trip from our previous home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. We’d spent a night each …more
I’ve signed up again for “50/50,” Max Regan’s 50-day online workshop. “Students will receive a writing exercise via e-mail each day and will write at least one page of text a day,” says Max’s introduction to the course. Fifty days, fifty pages—hence the title. For more information about the course, visit Max’s 50/50 blog.
The class provides no mechanism for feedback; its purpose is merely to inspire and stimulate participants to cultivate or expand their every-day writing habit. I’m planning to post my 50/50 output here again, however, so that friends and fellow writers who’ve expressed interest or curiosity about my writing can take a look and give me some comments. [View the archive of my 50/50 pieces from the spring 2008 course.]
If you’ve found your way here, either because I invited you or just by accident, I’d love to know what you think. Please post your feedback as a comment on the posting to which it applies, or if you’d prefer not to make them public, . (Or call me on the phone if your critique is likely to make me cry.)
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