Sanguine Tenacious Tidings

Dumb Trouble

Fun Fact Friday! On this day in 1903, Barney Gilmore of St. Louis, Missouri was arrested for spitting. What's one of the dumbest things you've ever gotten in trouble for?

I have to say it was for writing a short story I called "Coffee Cats." I have a Journal that I write stories and blogs in. The Journal has prompts. When I feel like I should write something I look up a new prompt and just write. I reread this story today. It isn’t even a very good scene. I’ve taken a class and written much better scenes since then. Maybe I should edit it some more. I could get into more trouble or less it depends.

One day my husband and I were driving home from a shopping trip in Erie. Well, he was driving I was sight seeing. We decided to go home a back way over back roads that we don’t usually travel. It was a nice day for an outing. I was suddenly struck by how much the same all the properties were. This is a very rural area. Erie has large shopping centers and heavy traffic areas but when you leave you quickly drive out of the city atmosphere.

Within a mile of down town you are into rural homes of anywhere from 10 acres to 30 acre pieces. It is also a struggle to live. Salaries are low; prices are often high. An example is gasoline. When other parts of the state such as Philadelphia or Pittsburgh may have gasoline at $2.00 a gallon the small towns and Erie may have gasoline at $2.50. a gallon. This is only an example not a picture of what gasoline may cost today.

So, this particular day I noticed that all these modern homes were similar. They also had small acres of forest attached, drove Ford or Dodge trucks, owned campers, had a small pasture where they raised beef, or a pig for extra meat, sometimes there is a chicken coop in the yard or a few ducks in a pen. Everyone lives this way. It is a way of life. There is a large interest in 4-H as well. I’m just trying to give you a picture of what I was looking at that day all the way home.

As we reached our own part of the countryside I realized more and more that, that is the way everyone tries to live and get by with a healthy way to live. The larger farms of 200 or 300 acres that used to be around here are breaking up. As owners mature and die off The children broke up the land, sold it off and became professional people or went into the shops as manufacturing workers.

Sometime that week I opened my journal and went looking for a prompt. The original prompt was something about writing for 20 minutes about some one who was using too much sugar in their diet. (We did some writing like this in a college creative writing class and I had not done much creative writing since I left college) After I wrote the basic piece I realized I needed to edit and edit and edit some more to make it any kind of a story. It started out as a story about a women pouring sugar into a cup of coffee while visiting her friends. I drew on my knowledge of women I met when I lived in Texas and North Dakota. I have been a member of lots of ladies meetings of all kinds over the years. I guarantee you church meetings, neighborhood coffee gatherings in the morning in trailer parks, meetings of horse clubs, birthday parties where the mothers gather in the kitchen and the children play some party games all these kinds of meetings have some similarities of social life.

I drew on my own life experience. It turned out to be the first really complete short, short story I ever wrote outside of school classes. I thought it was fun and creative. But, I did not realize that some people were keeping an eye on everything I write. (How they do this is another story) Some women in the area read the story. They picked it apart and decided I had written it specifically about them. This is simply not so. We like to think of ourselves as individuals but you would be amazed about our similarities. One woman said to me, “I have a friend who drives a truck.” I used to drive a truck myself and I have women friends who drive trucks now. Have you ever looked at a character in a book or at some of the actions of characters in books. We wouldn’t read the stories if we did not sometimes recognize something similar in our lives. I don’t laugh at these ladies who are upset with my story. They are not writers. I do laugh at how our world can be so similar that we don’t actually recognize it. In another story I wrote, which was also fiction, when they read it they tried to find out who I knew that was turning bears loose in the woods? That time I was rolling on the floor. Paranoia abounds, I will probably never live down some of my stories. I was dumbly startled by getting in trouble for writing.

Quote reference:{link: http://quoteideas.com/mark-twain-quotes/}

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself by Mark Twain