Writing Prompts and Secret Blogs

I had to resort to looking at writing prompts to come up with a topic today. That won’t be true come Saturday, having several fun things on my day planner to report on by then. But today I’m still in a dry spell. So what writing prompt did I pick from the list of 365? I went with the one listed for July 9^th…the day I’m actually writing this post which is: “Keep out! Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” If you want to challenge the writer within---and I do---you can’t pick and choose the prompts that come easy for you.

I was, however, tempted to pick July 16^th which was: “Dream home. You win a contest to build your dream home. Draft the plans.” I drew my first set of house plans when I was 13 or 14 and I haven’t stopped designing houses in my head and often on paper ever since. Dead center of my first house was a three stories high, round foyer containing a spiral staircase with a glass dome overhead. Two wings went off the foyer---one the formal living room and a library, and the other for the kitchen and dining room. Upstairs were four bedrooms and a massive landing overlooking the foyer. Kids. What do they know about anything? When I ran across those plans as an adult, the house looked like a brick prison with its flat roof and with all the windows at the back. Over the years my house planning aspirations have changed. The last set of plans I drew up since becoming a widow was a one bedroom house the size of a two car garage. But both my first and last imagery houses were built on Lake Michigan.

“Who is the one person you hope isn’t reading your blog and why?” It wasn’t my husband when he was alive and I was blogging on a stroke support site. I was writing about my experiences as his caregiver and I'd often read what I wrote to him as a way of communicating. And I have Oprah’s back-then fad of writing a gratitude journal to thank for finding humor in my upside down world. After Don’s stroke I was under enormous stress. He had lost his ability to walk, the use of his right arm and his speech. It took six months of speech therapy just to learn to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and they weren’t reliable even at that, so having “conversations” literally took hours where I had to debate both sides of what we needed to do to move forward. He thought he was going to get his old life back and I knew that was impossible.

The other person in world who I really want to read my blog is oldest my niece and she often does. It keeps me striving to be fair, honest and without embellishments when I write about my family. I love her like a daughter and wouldn't most people want their daughters to understand where you’ve been and where you’re at in life? (Patience, I am getting to the list of those who I don’t want to read my blog.)

Only a few others have had a personal invitation to read my blog: 1) a friend I've had since I was five; 2) a friend I met through my husband 48 years ago; 3) one of my Red Hat Sisters and 4) one of my Gathering Girls pals. The two old friends are...well, everything you'd want in an old friend (except they both live out of state) and like my niece, the thought that they might see what I've written keeps me striving to be as accurate as possible when I share memories here. The Red Hatter is a writer of immense talent and she understands that you have to dive deep into your head to write memoir and journal-type stuff---spilling the good, bad and the ugly along the way. She's only read my blog a few times out of curiosity. My Gathering Girls friend may be reading more frequently but she’s a genuinely nice person who’d never intentionally hurt anyone by repeating something negative I might have written. Trust. The bottom line is I trust all these ladies not to use what they read here as gossip fodder.

As you can see, I don't make a habit out of inviting people in my offline life to read my blog although I make no secret of it. A link to my blog is even in my bio on Facebook but to the best of my knowledge only one person has actually found it buried in the fine print and have been here to read---Tim, the son-I-wish-I-had. Tim and I are extreme opposites in our politics and Pro-life/Pro-choice support. He’s very religious and I call myself an agnostic but we’ve had many respectful, in-depth conversations so I know he wasn’t and won’t be shocked or offended by anything he reads here. I can’t say that about most of the people I come in contact with in this very conservative county in West Michigan and I have not been willing to take that chance. Until the past few years, I’ve gone above and beyond to hide my opinions on controversial topics and core values. I'm still very careful. Why? Out of fear of being ostracized. If someone in the blog community doesn't like you based on your world views, they'll just move on and you’d never know about it. In person, it's more complicated.... ©

Easier said than done.

Wright, Van Gogh, Beethoven and my Plans for Immortality

This week I took part in a Frank Lloyd Wright marathon down at the senior hall starting with a book discussion of Loving Frank and ending with a viewing of a PBS documentary by Ken Burns. Over five hours between the two. It would have been even longer if I’d signed up for the bus trip portion the next day to tour a classic Prairie house that Wright designed. I’ve been inside that house several times in the past and had no desire to see it again. I’m not a fan of its rigid, tightly controlled interiors but since my secret desire from age twelve to forty-five was to be an architect, I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to learn more about a man that many call a genius, thus the time I invested in the marathon was worth it. 

PBS describes the films we us saw this way: This two-part documentary explores the life of one of America's greatest architects -- hated by some, worshiped by others and ignored by many. Using archival photographs, live cinematography, interviews, newsreel footage and home movies, the film tells the story of Wright's turbulent life and his extraordinary professional career.” 

Built over 800 buildings including the Guggenheim Museum, known for his huge overruns, a hustler and a salesman/showman as well as a genius engineer and designer, Wright was unique. His personal life was riddled with scandal---left is first wife with a ton of unpaid bills and six kids to raise while he ran off to Europe with a married woman and never looked back. Got married two more times, had two more kids, Wright lived way above his means but he didn’t seem to care. His personal motto was, “Live in the now.” And just to keep his beloved Taliesin house in Wisconsin, his friends had to bail him out of bankruptcy on several occasions.

After leaving the movie marathon, I got to thinking about other people who put their mark on the creative world who were troubled or outrageous in their personal lives. Vincent Van Gogh of Starry Night fame, for example, a post-impressionist painter who suffered with what people now guess was bi-polar issues. He killed himself at age 37 and was said to have cut off his ear in a fit of madness. (Although not all historians agree on whether he or his friend Paul Gauguin lopped off the ear with a sword during a fight.) Then there’s Georgia O’Keeffe, considered to be pioneer of American modernism. I hate, HATE her canvases of enlarged flowers and I have no clue why one of them sold for 44.4 million 3-4 years ago. She was legendary for her “independent spirit” but her personal life was filled with anxiety, depression and hostility. And who could leave out Beethoven in a discussion of famous works created by people with a messed up personal life? Alcoholic, extreme highs, suicidal lows. Ken Burns compared him to Wright because near the end of his life when he could no longer hear the music Beethoven wrote the notes on paper to create masterpieces that have passed the test of time and Wright, well into his 80s, did the same with innovative and pioneering engineering concepts. 

What does it take to be so creative that your work is your immortality---to be a genius in your genre like Beethoven and Wright? Do you have to be a self-absorbed ass-breath? Someday will, say, Harvey Weinstein’s cutting-edge achievements in film production, his 194 credits, be a large enough legacy to transcend his personal failings and flaws? Will students of film study his movies like architect students study Wright, overlooking the people Weinstein hurt like the people Wright hurt fell by the wayside? Does art---The Work---rise above its creator? Or do the scandals, the whispers of wrong-doing, the self-promotions and the self-adsorptions actually help to elevate their greatness---calling attention to the mystique of the misunderstood artist that translates into upping their commercial value after death?

I really want answers because when I turn 80 and check myself into a nursing home I want to be the next Grandma Moses. I want to get “discovered” by a newly minted arts and activities director for building fanciful structures out of Popsicle sticks and paper clips and or for painting noses and lips, eyeballs and ears swapped out of their proper places on portraits of my fellow inmates. I want my work to make me immortal but I don’t want to be considered crazy or misunderstood until I’ve got someone else lined up to do my laundry and fix my meals. ©

Architecture, Material Girls and the Travel Club

My Travel Club, this week, sponsored a lecture about World Architecture. It was fascinating and made me wish I was young again and that the world was still safe to roam around to see the wonders of the world. The slide show started off with the pyramids and ancients castles and worked its way through the great churches, cathedrals and other religious buildings up to modern day concoctions that you’d be hard pressed to decide if you were seeing a building or a giant pile of salvage metal discarded alongside a highway. The cutie pie who did the lecture was probably in his late thirties and he worked for a company that designs public buildings all over the world, including a hospital in Egypt. Interesting side note: One wall in each patient room had to have an angled wall that pointed toward Mecca so they’d always know which way to face during prayers.

I was smitten with the lecturer’s confidence, his world-traveler experiences and his knowledge-base of a field of study I have taken a deep interest in since before my teens. Computers and 3-D printers have taken over many aspects of the field, giving rise to new ways of working. In the past, architects always worked from the inside out. Now, they can draw weird or wonderfully shaped buildings and design from the outside in. He also gave an example of how computers have expanded design options: a mall walkway roof made entirely out of glass---millions of pieces, no two alike, and a computer figured out all the shapes and sizes then cut them and barcoded each one as they were automatically produced so a human could install them in the right order. New materials and technology have always pushed architects to explore their possibilities.

The lecture bought two other interesting things into my day. 1) I got there ten minutes early and had a great conversation with another widow, nine years out. She’s in my new book club and it was the first time she’d been to my travel club. That’s been happening a lot lately---I’ll see someone in several places that I’m just getting to know. And 2) After having a small etching plate print haunt me for nearly 50 years, I finally found out what it was. One of the slides the architect showed was of the same structure and it turned out to be the “Arche De Triumphal” also called a victory arch---this one in Paris. They were first built by the Ancient Romans to commemorate someone conquering something and the tradition continued to where they’re all over Europe. I sold my print last summer and regretted it almost immediately. 

Yes, I am a Material Girl and I struggle with changing that aspect of my personality, not really sure I want to do it because I’m not dead yet and I still enjoy my stuff. If you remember Ms. Poetry from another blog entry (A Walk in the Woods) each morning on her Facebook page she has something from a site called ‘Becoming a Minimalist.’ We lived near a minimalist once; he borrowed everything from his neighbors so he and his wife didn’t have to buy or keep the tools it takes to maintain a house yet they bragged about how they’d simplified their lives. Great, learn to rent a floor scrubber or wet/dry shop vac instead of putting extra wear on your neighbor’s. 

Today’s message from The Minimalist site was: “Your life is too valuable to waste it chasing possessions.” How is it a waste if you enjoy the chase? Half my husband’s life was based on hunting old and obsolete things. Someone has to chase things like every Thomas Edison or Roy Rogers thingamabob ever invented otherwise they’d never end up in museums a 100 years later. I’ve already done two major downsizings in my recent history, and half my current frustrations come from feeling guilty for not doing more downsizing so my family doesn’t have to do it when I die. The other half of my frustrations come from being resentful that one day I might have to live in a couple of sterile rooms with no character or conversation pieces. I am fascinated by people who want to join the ‘tiny living’ movement but please don’t tell me I’ve wasted my life because I don’t want to live in 200 square feet with just two coffee cups and an iPad.

The day after the lecture I might as well have been a mushroom growing in a dark cave. My job list required dry weather and it rained and I didn’t have enough common sense to write a new one. I didn’t accomplish anything except writing a check for my snow removal service for this coming winter and taking a call about my upcoming bone infusion. Maybe I was just resting up for next twenty-five days when I have nineteen appointments/events on my day planner. I enjoy fall, long job lists always come with the season. ©

NOTE: The photo at the top of is Park Guell, a public park in Barcelona designed by Antonio Gaudi, a famous architect known for his colorful and playful designs, circa 1900. I could not live with that much color in my life but it would be fun to visit.