The fireworks are winding down and the crickets are chirping up this fourth of July evening on our back deck. Our house resides in between two strong neighborhood associations so the explosive celebrations are going on all around us, it seems. I'd like to blow up a mattress and sleep outside tonight because -- ear comfort aside -- it is so refreshing to be outside and to not have to work tomorrow. These days, holidays are more about rest and less about commemoration for me.
I was thinking about the funny dichotomy the fourth of July has for me, especially as I walked about one of the local celebrations. There's a real neighborhood feeling with people out in their yards with family and friends, grilling, playing bean bag yard games, hanging out at the carnival that smells like funnel cake, setting up for fireworks viewing. It's neighborhood feeling for them, but I feel more like the observer.
I thought about the backwards way I spent my younger years. Backwards in that when I was cute, free, and in my twenties I lived in austerity in a small town whereby the average age was 65 years old (supposedly according to the recent census, but now that I think of it, I have no idea if that was really true). A few years later I lived in hopping New York City, with an awesome international job in Manhattan, and most of those years were spent swollen belly preggers and/or as nervous maxed out new parent. Seems like that should have been turned around somehow.
I thought of those days today because I heard on the radio that the Statue of Liberty was reopened today for the first time after Superstorm Sandy. Of course that statue is smack in between Brooklyn (where I lived) and Manhattan (where I worked) and it also happened to be the view from my hospital room (in Queens) when I was laid up with placenta previa (placenta blocks the cervix, thus dooming both baby and mother to bleed to death upon childbirth -- not a big deal with proper health care, big deal without proper health care). I remember crying when the doctor said I had to stay home from work for one month. I literally bawled. Makes me laugh now because Bob's response to my trauma was to buy a new television "for my convalescence."
I've been reading Dinty Moore's "The Mindful Writer" (after looking at it sit upon my desk for a whole year because its such a pretty little book) and its full of good stuff. But there's one juicy little tidbit that I've been especially chewing on. He says that for your writing to work you must have pure motives, you can't write for the purpose of revenge or to "get back" at someone. I'm not sure how he knew I needed to read that as I've been plotting for a long time now to write in revenge, having to do with the aforementioned former job that my doctor saved me from for a month (although the vengeance-inducing episode didn't occur until years later). I even have a draft of a sucky essay called "My Saboteur." I have no idea what I would ever do with that essay if it ever got good, but so far the only thing good about it is the title. And I don't like the title because it makes my saboteur sound cool, and my saboteur was actually a coward. I've known for a long time that I need to let it go -- or at least not write about it, thus enshrining my saboteur on paper forever, wasting ink in printing it out. Or maybe I need to find another way to write about it, that doesn't involve revenge, maybe that's what would make it good. In the end, we are all cowards at one time or another.
Anyway, the bugs are starting to crawl all over my laptop screen and I'm taking that as a sign that this post needs to end, especially since it didn't really have much of a beginning. Oh yeah, the fourth of July.
Love to you all! Thanks so much for coming over to my blog. I truly appreciate it. And I hope you and yours are all having a wonderful summer.
With love from yours truly,
Natural Born Bleeding Heart
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