Sunday Ruminations
~ Tsuga-- our little boy-pup-- is finally growing up. Today, twice out of five times on our walk, he lifted his leg in the male-dog way to pee. When Nate was home, he tried and tried to train the pup, demonstrating in mime fashion how it should be done, but Tsuga squatted in a most embarrassingly gentrified way.
~ It has just started snowing. And unlike most snows we get, this one waited until daylight to start. I love the depth that a light snow gives to the view out the window: the bridge over the branch is sharp, hard-edged, the color of wood; the barn across the road is muted, soft cornered, going to weathered gray; the far ridge is a flat silhouette of faint pink-gray against gray-white sky sifted with snow and could just as well be a painted backdrop for a winter play.
~ One of us tends to catastrophize when a storm (meteorological or otherwise) is upon us or possible. And so the Army of One has been instructed to bring copious supplies of milk jugs full of emergency water up from the basement. We're rounding up our Y2K supply of candles, making ready, hoping we don't need all of this preparation, but just being the good Girl Scout and Marine. We'll know this time tomorrow if the all-clear has been issued. In which case, we'll have lots of free flushes and empty containers for Tsuga to play with.
~ This Park Service application thing sort of throws the coming months into potential confusion. Will the dog be okay five days a week for ten or more hours inside the house alone if both of us are gone all day? Should we plan the trip to visit the daughter in South Dakota in May and then cancel if we can't both get away? On the one hand, traveling hopefully, it would be nice to sink my teeth into a new experience that requires the putting on of an old and familiar hat (the field biologist hat, that is). In other ways, if a miracle happens I get the job (winning over the vet-applicants who have a ten-point bonus added to whatever their applications rate) that will subvert everything I had thought I was going to do this coming spring and summer. For everything you do, you make choices to not do myriad other things. This mortal deal of being stuck in merely one instance of time and place sure gets to be an impediment sometimes, and I'll be darned if I can think of any way around it.
~ I borrowed a book (as if I needed to fill a book-void) from a friend. This book is by and about the writing life of Nancy Slonim Aronie (Writing from the Heart). The author got her foot in the door by sending a tape with a few of her essays (previously only locally consumed) to NPR. And the rest was history. My friend thought I might be interested in this book since my little writings have been locally consumed via our NPR affiliate in Roanoke. I'll air my tenth this week.
These radio essays are about the only products I have to show for my time away from a regular paycheck. Hearing one's voice broadcast regionally has been fun (and terrifying) but I have no illusions or hopes of the larger stage. So many successful writers with whom I've spoken (including email) seem to say the notoriety of a few hard-won publications may not be worth what it took to get them in print. They hold up the weblog as the no-middleman way to make your words available to readers around the world, instantly and permanently on record. I think there's merit in that. And still, I feel compelled to have a more tangible consequence to my writing than my Sitemeter statistics and three thousand brief comments. I confess, I don't completely understand what drives me or where the journey is headed. And I sometimes feel guilty that I'm having so much fun going there.
Comments
Are you sure you wouldn't be able to bring Tsuga to the job?
Posted by: Pascale Soleil | January 25, 2004 1:43 PM
"I confess, I don't completely understand what drives me or where the journey is headed."
Can I have that tattooed somewhere upon my body so that I might have a handy reminder? There are times I feel as if I'm a leaf blowing in the wind, riding the waves of the current, and just struggling not to get crushed beneath the stomping of thousands of feet. Other times I'm in my element, and everything else fades away.
Either place, I still never know where I'm headed, but I sure am determined to get there.
Posted by: ntexas99 | January 25, 2004 2:35 PM
A bit of advice on the application:
Be absolutely sure that all your i's are dotted and t's are crossed. I applied for a lowly office clerk position with the NPS but my application was not even considered because I failed to notice that college transcripts were required. I thought this requirement was overkill for an office gopher job but they seem to relish throwing out applications on technicalities.
Posted by: fletch | January 25, 2004 3:23 PM
So send some tapes of the local NPR broadcasts to All Things Considered. You mean I wasn't the only grumpy jaded old writer out there?
Once, at a literary festival at Southern Methodist University, a published poet and I were chatting before the next session. We stood beside a long table filled with the books that the festival's authors had published. Poetry, essays, novels, books of short stories were piled high on the table. We talked, the poet with several books on the table, and I, about my longing to get published.
"There's a whole lot of excellent writing out there," the poet told me. "Many people are writing great stuff."
I hoped I could count myself as one of those.
"You know the difference between them and," sweeping his arm to include all the published works on the table, "these?"
"What?" I asked.
"Ambition. We're just driven to get published."
Amen. Go for it, Fred.
Posted by: trish | January 25, 2004 4:45 PM
Amen, Trish. I discovered blogs only a few months ago and still am amazed at the wonderful writing I can find there. Having worked for book publishers for 20+ years, editing, I know that a lot of published stuff isn't wonderful at all - it's just what the publisher thought it could sell, or it's by authors with some sort of clout, or as you say, authors with extra drive and ambition.
Posted by: Lin B | January 25, 2004 8:19 PM