Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Day In the life of Percy

Day in the Life of Percy

Today Linda and I went to Baraboo and ate at the Cracker Barrel. I really like the chicken strips and vegetables. Linda had some soup and liked it as well. Then we went over to the mall which was practically deserted. The Wisconsin Dells area is very seasonal and there isn’t much going on. The fudge shop which sells a $5 Ice cream cone was deserted. I bought a half pound of fudge and it was $7.50. It was good but very rich and I could only eat a little. Then we went into Land’s End and the dyes were so overpowering that I had to get out. I walked around and even though it was cold the air was fresh and I did a shuffle/jog and sang a happy tune to myself. “Life is good,” my dad used to say, “if you don’t weaken.”

My dad was supposed to take over the family farm but just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He loved the army and after WW2 stayed in. How does the song go….? “How will you get him back on the farm when he’s been to gay Paree?” Or it went something like that. Somehow I could never picture my mother living on a farm. She liked the social aspects of the service and all the entertaining and bridge playing. Plus she was a natural with languages and learned to speak them wherever we went. My Dad was a short little fellow and being in the Army made him feel like a “Big Shot.” So he loved every minute of the time he spent in the service.

I didn’t share his deep and abiding love for the vocation even though I spent a career in the Army. I had an aptitude for it but not a passion and I never fit the Airborne Ranger Profile. Still I was successful and it put food on the table and the girls through college. Glad I was when I retired and came back to the farm my great grandfather homesteaded. I went back to technical school and got a certificate as a diesel mechanic. “It was good enough for me and Linda Barkley” I think the lyrics went “….good enough for me and Molly MaGee…” Pretty clever the way I twisted them around, don’t cha know?

So here we are living on the farm and in two weeks Linda will retire as a nurse from Marshfield Hospital. It will be good to have her around and not see her always trying to psych herself up halfway through the week. How well I remember that drill.

I have always been something of a connectional thinker. I see things and I make connections. Maybe that’s why I have such a curiosity about everything and like writing so much. I connect things from my life to the characters I write about and when I do they seem to come to life. Da da da da….There goes that twilight music again. I think a writer can animate his/her characters by imbuing them with the spirt of past experiences. That a character really becomes more real that life if you put a piece of yourself into the sketch you make of them.

I was amazed last night when in just a couple of hours I wrote the pages for a new course I am proposing at New Horizons Academy; Talked about in yesterday’s blog. I like teaching the One Act Play Workshop and think the Exploratory Writing Workshop will be fun as well. Plus I am going to have to crank up a contest. The last one I built didn’t have very many takers and I shut it down for lack of interest. This one should do better. We learn much more from our failures than we ever do from out successes. We tend to take them for granted until they turn gimpy. Then we realize how good we had it.

Next week Linda wants to go see the new Twilight Movie. I read the series and couldn’t put them down. What a gifted writer, “What’s her Name?” is. I think she should have let the two sides slug it out but then who am I to say. She had a spin off character called Bree Tanner and wrote a novella about her. That happens to me a lot… I get a character that might only get a couple pages of viz in something I write but that I find myself really intrigued by. That happened with the characters, Manny Hardin, Petra and Bedelia. My wife really likes Bedelia and wants me to write more about her and forget about Manny and Petra…

Linda likes to play scrabble on line with her sister and daughters and friends. They get so into it and delight in sticking it to one another. My youngest daughter is an awesome player and keeps trying to beat her husband who is a real powerhouse of an intellect. One would never think it to look at him…He’s laid back and a “Good Ole Boy,” but he is one bright fellow.

I didn’t really want to write about the usual things tonight so have just been rambling on… It’s getting late. As my daughter used to say… “See you later on.“