When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
Sometimes when I’m really frustrated with writing, I get the most intense urge to clean an organize. I suspect this is better than shooting up, but it feels rat-like and pathetic. My little dust up. My mini purge. Today, it was all about the piles, labeling, organizing. There was a little face picking and scalp digging. Fun! Then I found a folder mysteriously titled “Film.” It had decaying articles with movie ideas, or kernels of ideas, or something even smaller than a kernel. A kern? There was an aborted memoir about an older gent I took pottery lessons from. Now there’s a money maker! It had the first tv pitch I ever wrote with my sister Gail (now a famous writer/director in Hollywood, ten years my junior, 20 pounds lighter – so annoying). Then I threw the whole thing out. Then I retrieved it.
Good story?
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Betsy Lerner 
Little spiral note pads, pocket sized, different colors, some with the coiled bindings on the left side, others, on the top. I scribbled down ideas while on the road, sometimes literally, the words all jarred and shaky from the movements of a car I was traveling in. Other passages were concise and tidy, thoughts while sitting on the side of the road or written in near darkness before crawling into my sleeping bag for the night. All were thoughts and story ideas, poems, random musings and recounts of dialogues and events from unique drivers I had earlier encountered.
I found the pile of notebooks in an old file cabinet I was cleaning out. It brought me back in time and I got lost for a few hours in the past. I was glad I saved them and wondered why I had wrapped such a treasure in a cheap gray plastic bag instead of safely placed in a fireproof strongbox.
You took pottery lessons.
Ah the creative mind.
I wrote music on my 88’s they said was too beautiful for the times.
Acrylic on canvas won me ribbons but I love watercolor because it is more unforgiving.
Stained glass paid my bills for a decade.
I never tried pottery. A money making memoir missed.
While cleaning out a rental unit for one of my clients, I found a stash of 1930s-era letters. The mundane chronicles of farm life and family squabbles, written in precise script, are a charming window into a long-gone era. I’m keeping them in a safe place as I’m certain they have potential as the core of a future WIP.
I prefer director/writer, thank you.
I prefer seraglio/beans, thank you.
And by thank you, I just mean Thank you. So great.
Oh, Betsy, what I’d give to see that first tv pitch you wrote with your sister. You have beautiful minds.
“There was an aborted memoir about an older gent I took pottery lessons from. Now there’s a money maker!”
It could be if you had sex with him.
When I’m supposed to be writing I can find similar “rat-like and pathetic” stuff to do. Does sorting dirty clothes count? How ’bout hosing bird poop off the patio?
OMG Donna my first thought was suppose she wrinkled the sheets with that old guy. Noe there’s a page turner.
Thank you WP for letting me finally see this comment after six weeks. Haha, 2Ns, great minds etc. 😉
Must have been something in the stars yesterday. My work day consisted almost entirely of my uploading expert documents to the cloud, seeding the realm with facts to rain down upon the hills and valleys of a case (fire, loss, heartbreak, but no deaths, and injuries merely minor). Sorting and shuffling and organizing the data, which I then did in the evening to my photography workshop. Got that all squared away, though had to dump about 150 GB of backups from my local drive to make room for the important stuff. Important to me. The fire still smolders.
They say — no, I don’t know who they are, but they’ve been talking — they say that such activities as filing and reorganizing and tidying up and squaring away, these are all things we do when we don’t want to face whatever it is that is more important.
How can anybody figure any of this out? If it doesn’t have to do with food, shelter, and stanching wounds, of what import does it have?
Well, try this — good stories feed us, shelter us, stanch our wounds — allegorically, of course, if I’m using that a-word right — and what better way to spend whatever free moments we may have?