Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Seeing What's There


I often see something that makes me want to stare—not to be impolite, but because I am fascinated. I do make a distinction between people and events that are off limits.

Once I stood, along with a number of other people, and stared at a man who carried a porcelain toilet bowl into the middle of a street and proceeded to flip pennies into the open lid.

I couldn't help eyeing a woman who parked her bicycle, took a bottle of soap bubbles out of her basket, sat on the wooden bench in front of a small town city hall, and blew soap bubbles.

I can't help eyeing people with placards— and then reading all the small and large print, but turning down the accompanying literature.

You never know when one of the things you see—people or objects or occurrences triggers an idea for a story.

When I watched a woman take out a bundle of letters and place each one lovingly into the mail slot at our postoffice she became a character in a story about a woman who collected pen pals. My character wrote long letters and kept a small notebook of when she sent the letter and the response.

When she discovered that one of her pen pals enjoyed a particular author she read that author's books. And on and on—

And the story started because I watched this woman lovingly place letter by letter into a mail slot.

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