Slowly, the sun takes center stage, rising from the inky water where it has slumbered overnight. A ring of light herds stars westward and gilds a stranger’s face on the pillow beside me.
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The above is my entry for this weekend’s Trifextra: Week Seventy-Seven challenge. They supplied three words (ring, stage, water) and asked us to contribute another thirty of our own, making a grand total of thirty-three words.
Question 176 (The Book of Questions by Gregory Stock)
Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say?
I’m not such a big fan of the telephone. I don’t mind ringing up friends and family for a chat, but I definitely get anxious when it’s time to dial up anyone else. I procrastinate, my hands sweat, my stomach churns. So yes, I rehearse…and I make notes. Then I pray that if I’ve rehearsed a voicemail message, the party I’m calling won’t pick up, or if I’m expecting to speak to a live person that a machine doesn’t ask me to leave a message.
Part of this anxiety comes from two phone calls that went horribly wrong while I was in college. The first occurred freshman year, when I shut myself in the phone booth and placed a call to AT&T to get myself a calling card (this was back in the old days, when no one had cell phones, and there were two pay phones on each floor of the dorm for long distance calls–I couldn’t save enough quarters to do laundry and call my parents each week). The AT&T customer service rep asked me for several pieces of information in order to process the application for the card. The first thing that tripped me up was my current phone number. I misspoke the digits, which made me all flustered, and it took about three tries to finally get it right. Then when he asked for details about who they should contact to get their money should I fail to pay the monthly bill, things totally fell apart. My parents had recently moved, and I had not memorized the new address. So I asked the rep to hold the line while I ran back down the hall to my room to retrieve my address book. I returned to the phone booth huffing and puffing, and opened to the page where Mom and Dad’s address should have been…only to find it was still the old one. So I stammered some sort of apology to the rep, sprinted back down the hall once more, and returned with my ultra-organized roommate’s address book, in which she had penned my parents’ new address in her impeccable handwriting. I sounded like such a complete and total idiot that I was sure my request for a calling card would be summarily denied.
I made the second disastrous call in the fall of the following year, during the college’s annual phone-a-thon fundraising campaign. One of the requirements to maintain my scholarship from year to year was donating a certain number of hours to the campaign, manning a phone and cold-calling alumni to solicit donations–streaking naked from one end of the campus to the other would have been only slightly more terrifying. The opening gambit of these calls was scripted, then it was up to us to either continue reading from the variety of scenarios and dialogues contained in the script or to ad-lib. After a couple hours of calls, I was finally able to pick up the receiver and dial without feeling nauseous–and then I called the number from my list and asked for Alumni X. The female voice on the other end said, rather unhelpfully, that Alumni X was not available. I followed the script and asked when would be a better time to reach him. “Never! He’s dead!” That scenario was NOT in my script!! I couldn’t have been more shocked, and shrilly started apologizing and offering condolences, drawing the attention of all the other phone-a-thon volunteers. Nothing worse than committing a grievous faux pas in front of a full audience, and I hung up crying, shaking, and completely mortified. The experience was so horrible that I seriously considered not going back to work the phones the following year, but decided another terrible phone call would be preferable to the wrath of my parents if I defaulted on the terms of my scholarship.
These days, if I am forced to make a phone call (thanks to the internet, I can avoid many), I run through a dozen different conversations in my head first. I make a list of questions I want to ask, and information I might need to give, so that I have something to fall back on if my mind goes blank at a critical moment. In all honesty, the worry and preparation are rarely necessary. With so many businesses and organizations moving to automated phone systems, nowadays the most daunting part of the call is listening for which number to press in order to proceed in English.
Dear Royal Baby,
We are not amused.
Your tardiness is infringing on our royal summer holiday. Our bags are packed, and we are most anxious to depart for Balmoral. We fear we would appear cold and uncaring if we were to leave for Scotland before your birth–the press were scandalized enough by our joking (mostly) comment today that we did not mind whether you were a boy or a girl, just so long as you arrived soon.
Besides, it would be damned inconvenient to drive eight and a half hours up the M6 just to find out that you had finally appeared, and that we were expected to rush back to Paddington for the requisite oohing and ahhing. In actual fact, we would be most content to meet you privately when you travel with your parents to visit Balmoral later in the summer.
We are hot, we are sweaty, and we are getting cranky. We long for the cool, green hills of Scotland so that we might escape the hottest London summer in seven years. You are urged, most respectfully, to hurry the hell up.
I have the honour to be (someday),
Your loving great-grandmother,
HM Queen Elizabeth II
At the risk of upsetting Her Majesty, I am secretly hoping the baby holds out for eight more days…then I can say I share my birthday with the future British monarch!
While the rest of the house slept, she silently sipped her coffee and eyeballed the bag waiting by the door. Mentally, she inventoried its contents as she crossed the kitchen; she hoped she had not forgotten anything vitally important.
She grabbed the pen and notepad off the fridge and padded barefoot to the old pine table where she hastily scribbled a goodbye note to her family. Normally, she was the one left behind, as one by one as they departed each day for school and work. But today she was the one leaving.
The kids were old enough—they’d be fine on their own. Her husband—well, he had his work and he’d never even notice her absence.
She anchored the note to the table with a box of corn flakes, rinsed her cup in the sink, scratched the cat’s ears one last time. Opening the back door a crack, she drank deeply of the warm late-August air and prayed that this was the right decision, that in finally considering her own needs she was not neglecting those of her loved ones.
She stepped into her shoes, reciting a silent mantra: “You can do this, you deserve this.” Grabbing her bag from the floor and the car keys from the counter, she squared her shoulders and stepped out into the early morning, a sense of freedom and empowerment replacing doubt as she closed the door quietly behind her.
Today, she knew, would be the hardest. New starts were never easy, but surely if she could make it through today, the days ahead would get easier. Just as her children had each survived their first days of elementary then middle then high school, she reassured herself that, as a grown woman, she could survive this, her first day of college.
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Today’s flash fiction inspiration comes from Trifecta: Week Eighty-Six, a challenge to use the third definition of the word crack in a piece of 33 to 333 words (mine is 299).
3a : a narrow break : fissure <a crack in the ice>
b : a narrow opening <leave the door open a crack><cracks between floorboards> —used figuratively in phrases like fall through the cracks to describe one that has been improperly or inadvertently ignored or left out <a player who fell through the cracks in the college draft> <children slipping through the cracks of available youth services>
Today’s photo, other than the fact that it IS a crack, has nothing whatsoever to do with the story. I took the picture on my walk yesterday, oblivious to Trifecta’s challenge, because I was frankly stunned that after all the rain we had between April 2012 and April 2013 the fields could possibly be dry enough to crack so deeply. Guess that’s clay soil for you.
I am frantically trying to get the house ready for the movers who are coming next week, so I could do with a bit of simplicity about now. This week, Ailsa’s photo challenge on her blog Where’s my backpack? is all about clean, simple photographs. Here are a few that I think fit the bill…
My favorite writing prompt this week was WordPress.com‘s Daily Post for Saturday, Your Life, the Book: From a famous writer or celebrity, to a WordPress.com blogger or someone close to you — who would you like to be your biographer?
I’m not sure my life story is interesting enough to warrant space on anyone’s bookshelf, but if there’s an author out there who I’d trust to turn the mundane into a page-turner, it would have to be Laura Hillenbrand. I admit that I’ve only read one of her books, Unbroken, but that one chronicle of a WWII POW’s survival sold me on her amazing abilities as a storyteller. The harrowing tale of Louis Zamperini, former Olympic runner, was presented with humor, grace, and sensitivity, and I was completely entranced from the very first page. Hillenbrand included so many details, from every aspect of Louis Zamperini’s life, gleaned from poring over letters and diaries, as well as countless interviews with family, friends, Olympic teammates and coaches, fellow POWs, and Japanese veterans. Her research and the resulting biography were so thorough that Zamperini has since called Hillenbrand to get details about specific events from his life so he can be accurate as he pens his own memoirs!
I’d like to hand over my story to someone who will take it on as her own, sifting through the minutiae of the past to create a path of words that allows the reader to walk right alongside me throughout my life’s journey. Someone who can sort out the jumble of events, emotions, relationships, and adventures of my past four decades, and make sense of how they’ve all worked to make me the person I am today. I think if Hillenbrand were in charge of this project, I would learn something about myself in the finished story!
The sun’s been shining for two solid weeks here in England, temperatures are soaring into the 80s during the day, and there are bodies everywhere. Before we moved here, I heard from more than one source that whenever the sun came out, Brits were so grateful that they would pull over on the side of the road, strip down, and throw themselves on any available horizontal surface to soak up some rays. While it’s not quite that extreme, from our vantage point in the blessedly air-conditioned pod of the London Eye, we could see that Jubilee Gardens was covered in ghostly pale limbs seeking an alternative to the perennial spray tan.
“Honey, I’m home! Just in case you didn’t hear me pull up in the John Deere…” This is not the first time I’ve seen this tractor with some kind of wicked-looking implement attached to the back parked in the drive. I can’t imagine commuting daily in a tractor, and the yard doesn’t appear large enough to require this kind of equipment, so I admit this is a puzzle to me. But these puzzles are part of what make my daily walks so enjoyable!
I have been known to collect “projects” at our fortnightly local auction house. You know, those items that require a bit of creative vision and a lot of effort to be usable and/or aesthetically pleasing. I’ve got rusty cast iron (a bell, a fence finial, a lantern) that needs to be sanded and repainted. I have an unfinished, water-stained wooden chair that needs sanding and some linseed oil. There are four balloon back chairs that need to be reupholstered. I bought a hideously bright blue and green set of drawers that need a toned-down paint job. Everything else needs a thorough cleaning to remove the cobwebs and bird poop that accumulated while the pieces were waiting in the barn for their day in the saleroom. I DID NOT buy this eviscerated Victorian nursing chair to add to the list. 🙂
I applaud London for its efforts to keep the city clean. Tourists and residents alike are pleased. People have jobs. It’s a win-win situation. But I have two questions. One, why are you sweeping already clean sidewalks when one block over candy wrappers and cigarette butts are stacking up like cordwood? And two, why are you pushing that big-ass sweeper through Saturday afternoon crowds; why not clean in the early morning or late night?
And finally, this T-shirt, spied in the market on London’s Portobello Road, has a message we might all want to consider…
Trying something new this week…instead of Six-word Saturday, I thought I’d showcase some snippets from my week that were worth a mention but not necessarily a full post of their own.
Things I See and Know 