I don’t seem to suffer from writer’s block–that horrible time when you stare at a blank page or computer scene and can’t bring yourself to begin. There are times, however, when I can’t write, like this January when I was celebrating my birthday and burying my brother.
Over the last few weeks, I found I had nothing important to say, or at least, nothing that was worth inflicting on others. I can always blather away about nothing in particular, but I mercifully try to keep most of that to myself. Instead, I’ve lately found myself thinking and pondering and struggling with meaning or some form of significance worthy of taking up someone else’s time.
I had another birthday, so I looked back on my year and my life and found I’m the same and different. I reconnected with a lot of long-lost relatives and friends over the past year and found I had been missing those connections. I hope in the coming year to spend more time with those people and to not misplace them again.
And my brother died. My last full brother, the last of the Fantastic Four, the small family that consisted of my father, my two brothers, and me. The time when we were a family I remember through the fog of time as being the happiest of my life. Mind you, this was when I was somewhere between five and eight years of age. In the house my father built with his own hands, I had a bedroom with horse wallpaper and a lamp that was a black knight on a black horse and, pinned to the wall, dozens of pictures of horses cut from magazines or traced from books. Are you detecting a theme here? During that time I spent Christmas with my Great Aunt Sadie in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we all ate popcorn balls and played Monopoly. It snowed, something that doesn’t happy in Albuquerque very often, and the luminaries on the tops of the adobe houses were beautiful. We four camped and traveled fearlessly and celebrated Treat Night every Friday (see my earlier post about that).
Things changed. My dad married and suddenly our family included a stepmom and two stepbrothers and, later, a half sister. Meanwhile, my mother had remarried and had a son, a half brother I’ve only come to know over the past few years. Time has been taking these people away from me, one by one. I still have one step brother, my stepmom, and the two half siblings. Over the holidays I visited my half sister and was delighted to see my father alive again in her mannerisms and turns of phrase–there was so much of him in her.
So instead of writing, I have been thinking. But enough of that. Time to write again.
Image: Birthday flowers. By Marilyn Evans