First Lines
I've read about people who disappeared for years without any sightings or leads.
Every day, usually an ordinary day of uncommon weather and no Breaking News, people vanish. The family asks if something was amiss: burdensome financial strains, a relationship gone awry, a looming illness, ennui. Nothing out of the ordinary, no markers. Perhaps it's foul play, maybe a kidnapping, or maybe they left behind the accouterments of life and walked away, turned a corner, and revised their life.
This is the alchemy of prestidigitation to me.
I am always spotted. People see me walking in other towns — I'm busy attempting to accrue more steps. Walking 10,000 steps a day assures me of fitting into the guidelines for a healthy lifestyle. I am apt to disappear into a book or between the folios or walking on a line or spotted caressing a word.
Twenty-eight years ago I attended a writer's conference, wrote poetry, drank Grand Marnier, and took long walks.
A cocoon. We joined the holometabolic insects--and started our metamorphosis into writers, or perceptive readers. For some the trajectories spiraled, sputtered, or lost velocity.
Move out of a cocoon and the rules change. Revision.
Last week a conference participant found me and sent an email—twenty-seven years after our last contact.
I am easy to find. In two weeks we’ll meet, eat lunch and catch up. What does that mean? Catch the next wave? Catch someone up on your life? Catch hold of the past?
We’ll politely listen to one another and wonder if either of us has written a worthy sentence— sentence laden with meaning, angst, and existential substance, humor.
On July 21, 1873 Jesse James committed the first train robbery west of the Mississippi.
Rock Island Daily Argus, Thursday, July 24, 1873: "Des Moines, July 23. - Nothing entirely reliable in regard to the pursuit and capture of the railroad robbers has been received at this place today. It is thought that they have crossed into Missouri and are making for the wilds of Mercer County in that state. The total amount taken by the robbers from the train in now known to be twenty three hundred and thirty seven dollars.”
Everything has a first. People track firsts—first tooth, first word, first haircut, first toothbrush, first full sentence, and first no. Remember the first sentence you wrote? Probably not, but if your parents kept every piece of paper, every lock and picture, then somewhere buried in a box held together with rubber bands is the first written alphabet, the first sentence, the first story.
1 Comments:
I'm often coming up with interesting first lines to short stories that I never seem to have the self-discipline to write. In fact, I rarely lack the discipline to even write down the first line, so then it is gone, disappearing before the story that never appears.
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