a marvelous thing...

on what comes first: life or fashion choices? ;-)

One day when I was about 20, or so, I decided I was going to be a writer. It was one of those perfect summer days when the sun flits through the trees like a flock of small gold birds. It’s funny that even though I remember the day itself perfectly, I don’t remember exactly what made me decide to be a writer. I think it had something to do with the clothes because all the writers I knew about dressed in black. I used to have blond hair, so I look good in black. I knew I would make a very good writer, all dressed in black with my very blond hair.

Not long after that, I went to a party where I met a woman who used to be in politics. She had been the personal assistant to a senator, or something like that, a long time ago. She was one of those people who crackle when they move. Kind of like the way a fire sounds near the end, when it has burned down to coals the color of the setting sun.

She pointed her finger at me, little sparks coming off her fingernail & said, What are your plans for the future? I looked at her for a minute & then I said, I am going to be a writer. She looked at me as if she could not see it. Which, to be fair, she probably could not, since I was still in my wearing-Hawaiian-shirts-for-every-occasion phase & not yet in my wearing-only-black-like-a-writer phase.

Then she said, What have you published?

& I stood there in the summer’s night, listening to her pop & crackle like a slow burning fire & I finally said something about a work-in-progress. She smiled one of those smiles where your lips move but your eyes are already looking for the beverage & snack table & then she walked away.

I stood there thinking, You know, I may have forgotten a very important thing about being a writer & that very night, I went home & without even changing out of my Hawaiian shirt, I wrote the first stories from my life & I have been doing that ever since.

Now & then, I think of her crackling away, maybe a little more slowly now since she must be at least 100 years old. I want to say to her what I would have said long ago on that summer’s night, if I’d been thinking when she said, What have you published?

What does that have to do with anything? I would say. What does that have to do with being alive? Because that’s what writing is, you know. It’s noticing your life & all the people & animals & trees & rain & sunshine & then putting it down in a way that you & everyone else never forget.

Some writers publish. Some don’t. But all of us can be writers because all of us have something to say about our lives.

But it still doesn’t hurt if you wear black.

with love, brian