20 Questions
August 22, 1999
8:24 a.m.
Are you a place? Brigid asked. The sun was down, and the sky was Indiana red and purple. A streak of orange ran like a feather. Brigid, Lisa, and I were sitting on our back porch and playing "20 Questions." You know, the game where the players get twenty yes/no questions to guess whatever the answerer has in their mind. Dinner had been cheeseburgers and zucchini and onions and tomatoes on the grill. This time next week, we would be preparing to take Brigid down to Louisville for a trip she's taking with my parents. We'll be without her for a bit more than a week. It's not the first time we've been away from her--we've been to conventions, and she went to Washington DC with her school this spring. But it never gets any easier. So Lisa and I decided to dedicate a majority of the weekend to her, and as we were playing twenty questions I thought back on the day. We had a movie, Bowfinger (cute if you like Steve Martin's humor--which I do). We went to the fish store and got a couple replacement fish because both Shadow and Neon had passed into the great ocean in the sky. So, now we have NeTwo and Phantom in there with Mini-Ne. They all appear to be getting along swimmingly, by the way. Then we read together, played a strange game called "Pass the Pigs," and had the cheeseburgers. Now we were playing 20 questions. And the sun was falling and the sky was gorgeous and the air was cool and tingling and there were high voices of kids playing in the park near our house. Brigid wrapped her arms around drawn up knees, her fingers straining to hold her upright. And I looked at those thin, long fingers, those fingers that are learning so ably to play piano and to clatter across a keyboard. And I saw a picture suddenly in my mind. ... a hand reaching out of a small hole in the ground, it's fingers straining outward ... there's a glass of water nearby, held by another hand ... everything else is just brown rubble and debris. It was a photo of the relief efforts and the search going on in Turkey right now. Now, before you start rolling your eyes here, let me say that I'm like a lot of people. Tragedy happens in a lot of places around the globe, and it always bothers me that I don't pay it enough attention. I had seen this photo before, and barely taken note of the human drama it entailed--a woman trapped underground, being given water through a small hole in the breech. So I saw Brigid's hands. And I looked at vivid colors in the sky. And I answered that no, I was not a place. There are a lot of things that I am not. The journal is a strange thing. You see, I wanted to write something about my writing today. I wanted to talk about my story, which despite John Savage giving me a few free ones, still remains without a title. I wanted to talk about story line development, about the design of the tale. But nothing would come about those things. Instead, I got the image of the sky, red and orange and a shade of purple that has no name. I got that glimpse of Brigid's fingers, and I got that picture. I wanted to write about how hard writing could be and about how the painstaking work of rewriting in the details was so frustrating it could make you scream if you let it. But instead, all I got were these images. So I'm sitting here this morning, knowing Brigid wants to go to the go-kart track today. And I'm working on the story with no title, and struggling with a couple issues. And through it all, I'm wondering what I've done to deserve such a life as this.   Have a great day.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"The family is one of nature's masterpieces." George Santayana |
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