Writing Prompts

Memories with my grandmother

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Another writing prompt in Old Friend from Far Away – Give me a memory of your mother, aunt, or grandmother. Begin with “I remember…”

I remember my grandmother opening a Christmas gift from my sister and me. On Christmas morning, we rushed my parents to get ready so we could get to our grandparents house on Wilke Lake as early as possible. It was only a half hour drive away, but each minute of that morning before we got to dive into presents was like a slow torture. My uncle would have driven up from Illinois the night before, and my aunt and her husband would pick up our great-grandmother on their way out. As soon as everyone was there, it was present time!

Grandma’s brown hair was cut short, permed and curly. She’s tall, thin, and wears glasses. She sat quietly smoking a cigarette in her chair while others opened gifts. Then it was her turn. My sister and I were excited to see how she’d react. We’d chosen a poster – maybe not the most practical gift for a grandma – but when we saw it, we just had to get it for her. After unwrapping the tube, she stood up to see what it was. She peeled the plastic off and wrangled the tightly rolled poster open enough to see the image. The grin on her face told us we had a hit! It was Don Johnson – Miami Vice. My grandma had a crush on him. She isn’t your typical grandma.

Learning to Fish

She taught me how to fish with a long bamboo fishing rod. It had no reel – just a fixed length of fishing line and a red and white bobber and hook at the end of the line. She showed me how to thread a wiggly earthworm onto the hook, and to gently toss the line out into the water, then watch for the bobber to dunk from sight. I stared and stared at the bobber, afraid to take my eyes off it. I was convinced fish were nibbling at my worm every time a slight wave made the bobber dip in the water. After pulling in an empty line over and over, I learned to have patience and wait until it really went under. I caught tiny pan fish – perch, bluegills, sunfish – the small fish that lingered in the water in the shadow of the pier. No one in their right mind would do anything other than toss these tiny creatures back into the water, but Grandma meticulously cleaned and cooked my catch, no matter how many fish it might take to make up a dinner.

She taught me never to panic when I got a fish hook stuck in my hand, and how to pinch a worm between my fingernails and break it in two, so I didn’t put more bait on the hook than I needed. She taught me how to scrape the scales off the fish, onto newspapers laid out on the picnic table, and how to clean the insides out just right so they were ready for frying. As I got older, she taught me how to cast with a rod and reel and how to adjust the height of the bobber and sinkers so my worm would hang lower beneath the water line. She helped me untangle the weeds I inevitably pulled in when I set the bait too low. Fishing wasn’t her only specialty, though. She could do anything and feared nothing.

Christmas Present for Grandma

She caught garter snakes and put them in a big glass jar so I could get a good look at them without running away in fear. I was a magnet for leeches when I swam in the lake. I often came out dripping wet, with the slimy back bloodsuckers stuck to my legs, feet, or toes, but she wasn’t phased by them. She sprinkled salt on the leeches which made them curl up and drop off. If that didn’t work, she torched them with her lighter until they released their hold on my flesh. When they fell, she grabbed them to use as fishing bait. She was locked in battle with a Northern Pike she named Moby Dick. She was convinced that her nemesis jumped out of the water every day, just at the edge of her casting range. He was taunting her, and she would best him one day.

My sister and I stayed at my grandparents house on weekends fairly often. We ran up and down the pier, rode around the lake on a pontoon boat (sometimes I even got to steer the boat!), and when we were big enough, took a rowboat out so we could fish further away. Lunch was a jelly sandwich with some chips and a cream soda – quickly inhaled, so we could get back to the business of running around outside. We caught frogs by the dozens and kept them in a bait box hanging next to the pier until it was so full, Grandma made us release them all so they wouldn’t die. We slept in the living room on the pull-out sofa. The sheets were crisp and clean and we fell asleep while Grandma watched her favorite shows on TV – Hee Haw, Benny Hill, Fantasy Island, MacGyver, and her favorite show of all – Miami Vice.

I’m thinking of…

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Today’s writing prompt was “I’m thinking of…”  I sat down to write after checking my email this afternoon and here’s what came this time:

I’m thinking of my grandfather.  I just read an email from my mom explaining that his hemoglobin count was too high.  Apparently that means he has too many red blood cells, or more basically, too much blood in his body.  He may have a tumor, but no one knows yet for sure.  It seems some tumors create extra blood in your body.  Bad news – bad health news – has come in torrents this year.  It defies understanding.  My mother had a stroke on New Year’s Eve.  She’s 56.  My uncle was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer a couple months later.  He’s also 56.  I was diagnosed with severe anxiety in between.  My nephew’s father died in a car crash in April, on my nephew’s birthday.  My niece had to have a piece of her heart frozen with some sort of cryo technology that brings the temperature of the tissue to -72 degrees F.  That was to kill some of her heart because it had two electrical spots that prompted it to beat.  When the second spot kicked in, her heart went into overdrive, beating as high as 300 beats per minute.  Now my grandfather has an unknown “something that doesn’t look right” near his stomach, according to a doctor’s interpretation of a CAT scan.  It just never ends.  He has had so many medical challenges to face in his life.  It took doctors a year to determine his body had stopped producing the enzymes it needed to digest food 20 years ago.  He lost more than 80 pounds in a year without changing the way he ate or exercised and it was all a big mystery for a long time.  They performed exploratory surgery on him back then in an attempt to figure out why he was vanishing.  They found his gallbladder needed to be removed, though he never complained of what doctors said should have been excruciating pain.  He is a borderline diabetic that had quadruple bypass surgery 15 years ago.  He has a wheat gluten allergy and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years ago.  He has pushed through all these challenges and seems stoic through it all, but I can somehow sense that he’s scared – scared of dying.  I know he won’t be able to last many more years.  He’s approaching 80, and that’s very old for men in his family.  I don’t feel the emotion of his impending death as I write about this now, but I often do when I think about it.  He’s always been the most important person in my life and I dread the day he leaves us.  Sometimes it feels like it will kill me, too.

I write about my grandfather a lot in my memoir.  I have dedicated probably 4 or 5 chapters to various things he’s taught or shared with me throughout my life.  I will post a few stories about what we’ve shared next in honor of my thinking of him today.

I am looking at…

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Today I began reading Natalie Goldberg’s books, Old Friend from Far Away, and Writing Down the Bones.  The first writing prompt in Old Friend is “I am looking at…”  My hand ached after writing for ten minutes because I rarely write on paper anymore, and I seem to have lost most ability to write legibly over the years, too.  I’m easily distracted on the computer, though, so I’ve decided to give paper a shot.  Here’s what spilled out…

I am looking at a basket of laundry. My basket is wicker, a smaller oval at its base than at its rim.  It’s full to overflowing with the laundry I washed this morning.  Its contents are organized the way I organize everything that comes from any sort of repetitive task I undertake.  First, at the bottom, my jeans and long-sleeved shirts.  They are the biggest items of clothing I wash (unless you count the towels) because I’m the biggest person in the house.  They fill most of the bottom of the basket, and I fill the leftover gap with socks and underwear – socks that are folded together in a ball, and underwear that’s just tossed randomly into a pile.  Small things that can settle into the space and fill it just right so I can place my next layer of clothes on top.  Next come my t-shirts and my partner’s clothes, which fold up so much smaller than mine do.  I arrange these things to fit neatly, as though each stack of clothes is a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.  Pants here, long-sleeved shirts there, short-sleeve shirts somewhere else.  The top layers are consistent, too.  My partner’s socks and underwear – they have to be folded, unlike mine which I just toss in my drawer.  I stack these near the top because if I bury them, they’d get messed up and I’d have to refold them when I get to putting things away.  Finally, the kid’s clothes and bathroom towels go on top because these have to be put away in different rooms.  When I mount the stairs, I will first put away the kid’s clothes, then the towels, then head into our bedroom.  This order makes sense because the basket will stay in my bedroom.  I start furthest away and hit all three places in a perfect order.  I only have to open each drawer once because I’ve organized the piles as I folded them – all like things together.  All this for efficiency.  I’m obsessed with efficiency.  It’s something I do because I can’t help myself.  I plan the most efficient path through the house, trying to combine tasks logically as I go.  I refine my steps as I repeat things.

The exercise was more fun than I thought it’d be, though I cut myself off after ten minutes because of my aching fingers.  A simple glance at my laundry basket, and I found myself writing about my semi-OCD tendencies.  The quality of the writing isn’t important to me – I’m just working on getting in the habit of writing about random things since I’m giving my memoir a bit of a break.  The interesting part of it is that I can see including a bit about my OCD self in my memoir – it’s an element I didn’t touch on, and one that I could generate some humor with.  Mission accomplished for the moment…