OffOfMadison

Tag: fiction

  • Secret Garden

    A couple of years ago, my wife and I did a bit of ‘re-dating’ each other. It was actually really fun while we did it, and the day that we shared today reminded me of that kind of fun.

    One of these ‘re-dates’ was centered around our going to the library to pick out a book for the other to read. I actually remember this day really well. She was in the middle of being hired for a position that was quite a promotion for her, so things were understandably tense.

    Wait, wait..why tense?

    I had just accepted my new role as a music teacher for a virtual school in Tennessee. I had, officially, accomplished the dream of getting to work exclusively from home AND not be associated with the local school district that had almost defeated me, mind and spirit. For me to get to pursue this while she potentially had to stay behind was a tacit unacceptability that we both understood.

    No pressure, but actually a LOT of pressure on this job for her. There had been a lot of uncertainty in the multi-stage interview process for her as the school was brand new and booting up for the very first time.

    What the…weren’t you guys just on a ‘re-date’?

    Yes…I’m getting there. Patience, phantom question-asker. As I was saying, the library date happened on a day that had a lot to do with that whole process for her. Library completed (and, on that note, if you haven’t checked out the library in downtown Covington, Kentucky…it’s a true diamond in the rough), we absconded to a local ice cream place up the road. I unfortunately can not plug the shop as 1) it no longer exists and 2) it was a pretty weird place, all said.

    As we sat down on the second floor of this older, speak-easy kind of house turned ice-cream shop and multi-tenant living, she had a call from one of her interviewers. She had almost certainly gotten the position, but the partnership between the school and K12 was holding things up.

    What does this have to do with The Secret Garden?

    Well, first, I didn’t evoke the book’s proper name in the title of this post, did I? *checks title* Nope. So presumptive!

    Unrelated, but did I mention that the book she picked for me for this date was The Secret Garden?


    *Audibly groans*

    It turned out to be one of my favorite reads. Well, favorite almost reads. I have a little left to go still to do this day. It’s almost like I don’t want it to end. This book gives me a glance into how my wife sometimes felt when she was younger, so I haven’t finished it on purpose. With my not having completed it, I feel like I still have a fresh, opened window into her past that I can peer into for the first time. I can only finish this book once, so I’m saving it.

    Also, if you’ve wondering about her job offer and haven’t read earlier posts; yes, she did in fact get the position and has been rocking it out ever since. One of my prior high school band kids is even one of her teachers. How cool is that?

    Didn’t you say something about this tying into today?

    Right! So, the thing about my wife is…she is that walled-in secret garden, in fact. From the outside, you see walls in the midst of a lesser garden. Only a very select few get to find the way into the garden within. And once let inside, nothing can ever be the same.

    You see, CLM is a very protective person. I won’t get too into those details with you, but she has intentionally placed walls up to keep almost everyone from truly seeing within. I’m just about the only lucky protagonist in the story of her secret garden to get to see her at her best.

    And, folks, her best puts the rest of the garden in an almost clair obscur. Once you’ve beheld the light inside, all else seems gray to dark. The contrast I lacked the context to see prior is stark. Today, she was her secret garden.

    Not to be too on the nose, but CLM loves flowers and gardens. I used today’s venture into our Lowe’s for a chainsaw as a way to try and get her to open up enough to enjoy that love. She did. We cut a dead tree down from the yard, sure, but then I got to see her plant so much life and radiate a glow all the while. This is what I mean about stark contrast.

    Now, a love for gardening isn’t much of a thing to hide, sure, but that’s over-simplifying what I’m trying to say. She reserves her true self. And yes, this does offer her some protection and allows her to pick and choose how much anyone can see or know. Why she chose to let me in, I’ll never understand. I’m like Colin Craven over here: dad issues, a history of some medical issues, a bit emotionally fragile…but I am also like him in that I, too, am transformed by being inside of the secret garden that is my wife, Carla. Today that simply meant watching her plant flowers and work on her container garden. But to me, that glimpse inside is precious, treasured, and powerful. I am eternally grateful to be the Colin to her Mary.

    Secretly,
    Bryce

  • Working on a working title

    As someone starting a blog just for the practice of writing, I seem to find myself thinking about it an awful lot since I started it recently (yesterday). I got here through author advice and through over-working the front half of my book. Having provided a bit of background and history in my first blog, I’m going to vaguely setup how “the book” came to be. My hope is to add to the narrative of why I’m here blogging with you now.

    “The book” doesn’t have a title, for one. I’ve gone through a couple since beginning it years ago, picking it up and then putting it back down…all in different seasons of my life. This yielded a lot of different takes on what the focus of the title should be. I will say this, though, the book began with a single directionless sentence.

    “The dust had settled.”

    That’s not to say that those words are still the very first in the book as they are not. But the whole project started there while I was bored on a second gen Chromebook before the band I directed had to perform at a football game. School ended at 2:45 with the football game beginning at 7. Band call time was 6, so I often found myself with lots of empty time such as this.

    If I remember right, I had just finished the entire Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Besides feeling utterly betrayed (no worries as I will not inundate you with spoilers), I constantly found myself remembering the series’ opening line:

    “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” 

    Just…wow what an opening line. It assumes you know things that you, as a reader, definitely wouldn’t know on your first read. For example, the word “gunslinger” helped me to immediately see so much about the world without another single word. The gunslinger, without any description, instantly had clothes, stature, and even a face. And having that sentence set in the desert gave me a climate and even a smell. King made me squint my eyes to sunlight I couldn’t actually see as it bounced off the dunes. I swear that, in the moment I read that sentence the first time, I felt warmer than I had prior. With so few words he made me feel and see so many different things.

    Not to make all of my blog posts about thanking authors, but thank you so much for that sentence, Mr. King (though I wish I had taken your in-book warning to stop reading book 7 when you gave it). Anyways, I wanted to to do the same thing, and thus “the dust had settled” was born.

    Now, I’m under no delusion that I’ve replicated the effect of that opening line, but I’m also completely aware that, even at the tender age of 43, I’m a complete rookie here…and that’s ok.

    The sentence slowly became some paragraphs. Revisions inbetween classes turned into characters and a flow. This all formed a preface and chapter 1 a lot sooner than I had imagined. As I mentioned in my first post, I sit down and write with an attitude of “ok, now what happens.” And as I really started to write back then I noticed something: that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t hit with “blank canvas syndrome.”

    Whenever I would compose or arrange music for either my choir or band (especially composing), I would run into an almost immediate writer’s block starting out. Half of the the process was finding my way out of that block each and every time I sat down to write music. Arranging was easier than composing as it’s working from already existing material, but it would still happen when it came to voicing or, say, marching percussion parts.

    Whenever I worked on “the book” and (as I’ve only recently learned) this blog, I’ve not found this block to happen. That doesn’t mean I would keep everything I did end up writing on any given day, but I never had any trouble writing forward (or even, sometimes, backward). So, no matter what was going on in life, I was always able to pick “the book” up and make progress, even if it was by baby-steps.

    Truth be told, that doesn’t mean I was dutiful in keeping “the book” going as I very much was not. School, college, band…I had tons of excuses for not sitting down and working on it. And, honestly, most times I didn’t even need an excuse. Recently, though, I’ve been making an effort to write every day…both in “the book” and here in the blog. Day 2/Post 2…so far so good.

    “The Book” is completely outlined and into Chapter 5 is written up to page 75. I even have notes for how Book 2 begins. I don’t mean any of this to be anything but descriptive of how it’s going. I can at least tell you this: it makes me happy to write it and even happier to have my wife read it.

    The real trick, I’m finding, is trusting her to be completely honest with me about it. As far as current levels of adversity go, I’ll take it.

    Best,
    Bryce