A Template For My Life

It is November 19, 2024, I finally started reading Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott. I have started it before but never finished it. She’s my favorite writer. I have never read any of her fiction, which is how she got famous. I’ve only read stuff she has written about life, non-fiction stuff, after she got famous writing fiction. She says to write every day. I have always read you should write two hours a day. That is an impossible commitment. So I’m going to try to write for an hour. I set my timer for an hour. She says to start with your childhood. I did that in my self-published memoir, Don't Let The Devil Steal Your Song, but this would be a different journey. I’m not sure how I managed that book. I thought I had things to say that might help someone. And God guided me all the way. I want God to guide me all the way on this journey, wherever it leads. The first thing that happens is I get a message that my security thingy for my computer expires today. Why didn’t they give me a heads up? Some kind of warning. And why does Windows have to expire this version and tell me I have to “prepare” for Windows 11 and that I have to do something special if I want to transfer my documents to the new version? And my laptop is not going to be able to be upgraded to the next version, so that means I will have to buy a new one. All this is much too much trouble. Maybe I should just go buy a typewriter, and just go online with my tablet and my phone. What is this world coming to? Lamott tells her students most of them probably won’t get published. She tells them getting published isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whatever. Okay, fine. Seems to me it would be pretty cool. She says, yes, you have to have an agent. Her dad was a writer and she submitted her stuff to her dad’s agent. That’s how she got started. Lucky her.If I were a whiner, I would say she had some kind of privilege. She is white, and her dad was a published writer. Would that be an example of white privilege? I could call that "write privilege." So my earliest memory was getting weighed on a baby scale. I don’t know how it’s possible to remember that, but I do. It was cold. That’s all I remember. What is my next memory? Living on Park Lane. Knowing the neighbors across the street and next door to the right (I don’t know what direction that might have been) and down on on each corner across the street. And I have a friend who lived behind me on MacVicar. Well, that was heaven, those years were heaven. Having an English Springer Spaniel named Debbie and a red long-haired cat named Rudolph. My parents were together then. Everything went downhill a few years later, a couple of years after we moved from Park Lane to Seabrook. We took Debbie with us when we moved, but Rudolph liked the next-door neighbors better than he liked us, so we let them have him. So the next thing that happens, we move to the West Side (leaving the best side), and shortly after, everything evaporates. Park Lane is still my favorite street in Topeka. It’s got like five houses on each side of the street and then Children’s Park on the north and 8th street on the south (if my directions are right). It was the best place in the world I could have started out my life. The old days, the 1950s, when life was good for just about everyone in America (or so they say), and we knew we were lucky to be alive at such a time as this. We took it for granted though, maybe that’s part of the problem. All the kids on the block knew each other and we played together. We made up scenarios and acted them out as we went. Kerry was the ringleader. He was the oldest boy, about what? Maybe 10 when I was 7, something like that. He was nice looking and all the girls took turns pretending to be his wife. And we walked to school. For some reason I remember him carrying a big stick as if it was some kind of staff or something, saying, “War is hell.” We had a maid named Maggie. Daddy was a judge, and my mother was beautiful, an artist and English. Both of my parents were absolutely stunning in appearance. But my dad had the roving eye, and I guess that was his “besetting sin.” Sure wrecked everything for us. But he was still my hero. I never blamed him, I always blamed my mother. I don’t know why. Because when she developed a drinking problem, I blamed it on that, although maybe she developed the drinking problem because of Dad’s roving eye. She told my brother and me different stories. I mean I remember my brother telling me things she told him that she never told me. Like how they would have people over and he would disappear and she wouldn’t know where he was. I have no memories of that, and she never told me that. But it all came down to that, I suppose. Then there was divorce #1, the most cruel devastation of my life. As long ago as it took place you would think the effects would fade away, but they don’t; instead, they sort of created a template for my life. Everything else that happened pretty much fit into that template. The template of brokenness, you could call it, the template of destruction, of disappointment, of tragedy, of sorrow, of grief. And each successive divorce kind of all fell into the first one like those cups that fall into place. You know, those cups. People pile them up, take them apart and put them back together so fast your eyes can’t catch it all. Oh well, so this is the first step of my journey I could call “a template for my life.” Sounds kind of cool, I don’t know why. My shoulders kind of hurt. Being hunched over a computer. Is that my ears ringing? Never heard that before, really. Only heard what’s been going on around me, what’s on the news, what’s going on in the world, the heat or the air conditioner, the refrigerator, who know? Very interesting. My heart has been wanting to cry over some stuff lately, haven’t been able to bring it up. The tears have been trying to inch themselves forward and spill out somehow, and sometimes they have for a moment or two, and that relief is worth waiting for. So here we all are. Feeling lost and alone sometimes, knowing, by faith alone, that we’re not, or else we may not have survived to tell the tale. And wondering if any effort is really worth the trouble. But taking the next step, regardless. That hour went pretty fast. I like the feeling of typing on a computer. I just wish they didn’t have to be hooked up to a system that is so complicated. I wish I could write it all down by hand like the Bronte sisters did.