I used this photo yesterday for my Fairy Tale Lobby blog post, but it seems so appropriate for today. This image is stenciled on a wall in the Bogota children’s museum. If the Brave Little Toaster ever took a voyage to the moon, this would be his space ship. Zoom!

Zoom is what I’ll be doing tomorrow. I’ll wake up in Media, PA, and zoom! I’ll be having dinner tomorrow evening in St. Louis. And then, for the next three days I’ll be zooming from venue to venue telling stories under the auspices of the 34th Annual St. Louis Storytelling Festival, until Sunday morning, when zoom! The put me on a plane and before nightfall, zoom, I’m back in Media. I thought I’d have to ask Jack to tape the final episode of The Bletchley Circle for me. But no. I’ll be home in plenty of time.

And this brings April, and the A-to-Z Challenge to a close. To everyone who popped in and left a comment, thank you!  To everyone whose blogs I popped in and commented on, ditto! I’ve read some lively writing this month, thought about things that hadn’t occurred to me before, and gained sustenance from interacting with other word nerds.

About this compulsion to squeeze words from our brains and put them in readable form, Dylan Thomas sort of said it all in his poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” You can cut and paste that title into a search box and see what I mean. Australia’s Banjo Patterson said it a little more upbeat:

“Big Z, little Z,
What begins with Z?
I do. I am a
Zizzer zazzer zuzz,
as you can plainly see.”*

*Dr. Seuss’s ABC — Random House Books for Young Readers, 1963.

…or if you want the primary grade version of that sentiment:

“Big Y, little Y,
Yawning Yellow Yak.
Young Yolanda Yorgensen
is yelling on its back.”*

This one was published in 1964. Who remembers “Hootenanny”?

When I was still struggling with query letters and cold submissions and slack-jawed admiration for the published romance authors in my creative writing classes, I was so focused on Getting Into Print that I really didn’t reflect on why I wanted so badly to be a published writer. I knew the odds were astronomically against the possibility of making a living as a novelist. But maybe I’d beat the odds. And so in the course of seven years I wrote three novels. Which I submitted and resubmitted. Which got rejected and re-rejected.

With each rejection I asked myself , Why do I do this? What is this compulsion?

I concluded, Obviously, it’s a character flaw.

I was raised to NOT draw attention to myself, to NOT put myself forward. “Blessed are the meek.” And here I was waving my arms, bouncing up and down, hollering “Yoo-hoo!  Pay attention to me! See what I’ve created!” And why? For some sort of pat on the head? So some grownup would say, “That’s nice, dear.”

In the middle of winter semester, 1982, my writing teacher died. Slow rolling suicide: sixty-three years old, and he hadn’t known a sober day since 1938. Amazing teacher. Thirty years before I met him, he had been an amazing writer. But he hadn’t written anything for publication in at least 30 years…I thought.

I ended up being the one who packed up his papers and books — a significant collection of American novels and criticism spanning the 1920s through the 1940′s — getting them ready to send to the University of Tulsa, whose library was willing to accept them. Among the papers I found carbon copies of recent query letters, banged out on his Underwood manual typewriter,  and stapled to them were the originals of recent rejections.  These weren’t rejection slips; they were letters. The editors still knew him, they addressed him personally. But the bottom line was “good luck placing your work elsewhere.”

Hansford couldn’t quit doing it, either, I thought. Is that what really killed him?
…..
It’s all about that YAWP! Making yourself heard. And maybe someone who hears you will feel as though they’ve been recognized.

Dr. Seuss’s ABC. Random House Books for Young Readers. 1st published in 1963.

If you can’t ride a funicular, a trolley is the next best thing.

Today Jack and I road the Media trolley from one end of the line to the other. I had no idea! That little car that stops traffic on State Street in Media toddles all the way to 69th Street in Upper Darby. It goes within half a mile of my dentist’s office in Drexel Hill. It takes you under the I-476 overpass, which, if you look at it as monumental architecture instead of infrastructure sort of takes your breath away. The support columns tower overhead, and the bottoms of the columns are tagged from the ground to about 7 feet up — just about as high as a kid with a can of spray paint can reach. Graffiti pedestals, if you will.

I’ve never seen so much terra cotta! It’s like a happy collaboration between a cake decorator and a tile maker. Google it: “upper darby mcclatchy building”

So you ride for half an hour, stopping every three blocks or so until you reach the other end of the line, where the John H. McClatchy building looms quietly across the street, and nobody else seems to notice it. We walked around a couple of blocks, found some good Thai food for lunch, got back on the trolley pointing the other direction and headed home. I guess the return trip could be called an incursion.

I lived in Sydney for the year between my 20th and 21st birthdays. Until that time, the only public transportation I had ever known was busses. In Sydney, there were busses, trains, and ferries. I remember a few Sunday afternoons when one of my flatmates and I walked down to the dock at the end of our road, rode the ferry across the harbor, where we caught a train and rode it to the end of the line, and then we’d either take the next train back the way we came or wander around til we found a bus stop. Thirty-five cents.

Several years ago, I managed to get myself hired to do library programs in all the public libraries in Washington, D.C. At the time, I lived 50 miles south of Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I was delighted for the gigs, but terrified of driving in downtown D.C., terrified of getting stuck in traffic for two hours behind a jack-knifed semi on I-95. So rather than risk the vicissitudes (Did I use that word a couple of days ago?) of traffic, I determined to get to all 27 of those libraries via public transportation. It was a combination of Virginia Railway Express, Washington Metro, city busses, and walking. Time consuming. Not cheap. Physically demanding, especially when you’re schlepping a backpack full of origami paper. And one of the most educational challenges I’ve ever set for myself.

Sort of like this business of blogging every day for a whole month…

Long light at Route 1 and Sproul Road. People have had time to festoon the guardrail with their favorite bumper stickers. Here’s the one I pulled up eyeball to eyeball with.

“W, W, W –
Willie Waterloo
Washes Warren Wiggins,
Who is washing
Waldo Woo.”*

After this one, I only have four more posts to go and then I get … what?

I get the satisfaction of following an intention through to the end. For someone with the attention span of a gnat, that’s no small thing.

As I’ve been showing up daily at this “New Post” screen, I’ve learned … what?

That sometimes you don’t know you have anything to say until you start making words appear.
…sometimes you make words appear, and you find you still didn’t have anything to say.
…oftentimes you get the most heartfelt responses on the posts that you thought didn’t say anything.
…more often than that, when you felt you did indeed have something to say, the deep thoughts you expressed go unremarked. Which isn’t to say they are unremarkable, but you have to be willing to entertain that possibility.

As I’ve visited my “stats” page, more than once a day during this blog-a-thon, I have confirmed … what?

All right, I admit it: narcissistic tendencies.

…which has made me wonder … what?

Why. Why I spill what I’m thinking out of my brain and onto a page full of words.

Reason #1 — I can’t paint.
Reason #2 — I don’t compose music.
Reason #3 — I can’t help it.

I just thought of my word for Monday.

From “Dr. Seuss’s ABCs”
Random House Books for Young Readers, 1996. (It was published years before that — 1963.)

V is a letter I don’t want to see showing up in my scrabble alphabet assortment. Like the letter C, it contributes to no two-letter English words. Unlike the letter C, it only serves as the final letter in a handful of words, only two of which I can think of off the top of my head: shiv and lav — two words I don’t recall ever using in conversation.

I was going to say there are no English words with double-V, but a quick Google search proved me very wrong: revved, divvy, skivvies, savvy, flivver, to mention just a few — all words I love using in conversation whenever the opportunity arises.

Last week Words with Friends froze on an ad screen. It wouldn’t play, and it wouldn’t go away. There was nothing for it but to kill the app and reload it, which wiped out all nine games I had going with my friend Darla and my sister Keun. I reloaded the app, and we’re gradually getting back up to speed. It’s a good balance, me and my prime opponents. I usually beat my sister, which mystifies me, because she’s got a formidable vocabulary and she reads about five times more than I do, but there you go. (She tends to kill me in Scramble; and when we get into conversational battles of one-liners, I’m toast. She’s a fast thinker. I’m not.) On the other hand, my friend Darla almost always beats me…badly…and often with two or three seven-letter words in one game. Granted, they are sometimes seven-letter words I have never encountered in print, but when I look them up, ta-da! They’re totally legitimate.

When Jack and I were getting acquainted, we were both surprised and delighted to find out we were both word geeks. No pun is too stupid for either of us to give it an appreciative groan. Some of our favorite words have Anglo-Saxon roots. We spend weekend mornings hunched over strong black coffee and the New York Times Sunday crossword. And whenever one of us discovers a new word, it’s like we’re back in first grade with something special for show and tell. Today at the dentist’s I encountered the word bruxism. It’s something I’ve done for years and am in remediation for, but I never knew grinding my teeth was called bruxism. Just now when I shared my new word with Jack, I felt much as I imagine the cats feel when they bring us dead voles. I have to say, his response to my new word was a lot more positive than my response to a feline victory dance with vivisected vermin.

*from dr. seuss’s abc again.

Underwhelmed with inspiration to write. Ugh.

I just finished a really fine book. It’s titled “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” by Maria Semple. An epistolary novel about what happens to creative people when they don’t create. I’m taking it as a cautionary tale.

Looking out the office window, I’m not seeing evidence of any of the neighbor’s houses that were still visible through the trees as recently as day before yesterday. That’s how fast spring is happening, now that it has finally arrived; and may I say I totally approve of spring holding off until the middle of April. I have no complaint with the cold dampness, either. It’s the meteorological equivalent of keeping your corsage fresh by putting it in the refrigerator. I’ve never seen forsythia stay in bloom this long before. Redbuds, too. And the dogwoods are taking their time. You can get lost looking up at the undersides of dogwood blossoms. There’s my U-word: “undersides.”

Our yard doesn’t have a dogwood, or I’d run outside and take a picture to show you what I mean.

Today is pure writing drudgery. 5 more days til Z.

Teabag wrapper lighter-than-airrings.

I remember when I used to strive to make my creations look “as good as store bought.” When food that looked and tasted like it might have come from Betty Crocker’s test kitchen was haute cuisine (at least in my neighborhood, an Orange County subdivision that was actually named “Suburbia”). When convenience trumped all other considerations about routes, menus, entertainments, and social gatherings.

I made these from something plastic I picked up off the tent floor the last time I went to Cirque du Soleil. Free medium!

Finally, it appears, a critical mass of us are wondering what we’ve been missing out on.

So today, Earthday +1, I celebrate the spirit of my grandparents — my mother’s father and my father’s mother — Grandpa Herman and Grandma Rose. Two smart, creative workaholics who raised their families in Oklahoma, on the edge of the dustbowl, during the Great Depression. Today I celebrate darning eggs and turned collars, hand-me-downs, taking up and letting down hems; I celebrate dirt and compost; I celebrate those much maligned words “frugality” and “thrift.”

I love the patterns on the insides of security envelopes!

From the googling and ogling I’ve done on “makerspaces,” it appears to me there’s a lot of high tech hardware and highly expensive software needed to equip one. Which means you’ve got to be able to afford membership in the club. Unless you find all these riches are your public library. But even then, I bet the makers who avail themselves of these resources at the public library incur some out-of-pocket expenses.

My newest mirror. 328 bottle caps squished through a square hole.

I keep thinking of the artist I wrote about for the letter B — El Anatsui, the guy who made such monumental works out of bottle caps and empty cans. His advice to his students: Choose a cheap medium. One that is abundant. I would add my own corollary: Go low-tech. Better yet, no-tech. That way you can still make art when the power goes out.

That’s just one reason origami and storytelling make so much sense to me.

*****

Penultimate T-word of the day: Trolley

Jack and I have a date. Saturday we’re riding the Media trolley from one end of the line to the other. He’s lived here for about 18 years and has never ridden it. I’ve been here about a year and a half. It’s time!

And finally: Mañana

It’s 33 minutes away.

Partly to get my stories for tonight up fresh in the short-term memory part of my brain. Partly so I can time the set I have planned and the introductions I’ve been thinking about, because the one thing you do NOT want to do is run over the time allotted you. Under time, if it’s only a minute or two, isn’t so bad. Over time by more than a minute or two, though, is not only sloppy, it’s rude, it’s disrespectful.

But mostly I’m feeling the need to rehearse and re-rehearse for tonight — and I only have a 20-minute set, so it’s not as though I have to carry the whole evening — additionally, the audience is liberally sprinkled with other storytellers, and I have to say that we tellers, generally speaking, are receptive and supportive of our fellow tellers’ work — and of course the rest of the audience will be people who are there to enjoy themselves, not tear the performers apart; I mean, it’s not like I’m defending a thesis or auditioning for a Broadway show. But still,

I’m feeling anxious about tonight’s gig, feeling the need to re-acquaint myself intimately with my stories because the stage lights in the theatre are blinding and I won’t be able to see anybody’s face. That makes the conversation that is storytelling difficult to keep from sliding into the realm of monologue. For me, it’s all about the give and take that happens when teller and listener react and respond to each other as the story unfolds. I’ve got to try to get that dynamic flowing tonight without eye contact. So I’m going to go rehearse with my eyes closed. We’ll see how it goes.

…and that’s as far as I’m going to take that Q thing.

It’s wet and dreary and I haven’t seen shadows for several days. BUT, it is warm enough to sleep with the window open at least a crack, and there’s no lullaby like a steady rain to send you to sleep.

I have a storytelling gig tomorrow. And one next Tuesday. And a four day gig in St. Louis week after next. Not only that, but the Origami Swami has just been engaged for Mother’s Day in Atlantic City. And some out-of-the-blue work in Maryland. Somebody sent me a query about doing a motivational speech for teachers. (Sure. I can do that!) And somebody else is curious to know if I’d be willing to teach teenage library patrons how to make origami earrings out of teabag wrappers. All new contacts, new clients. Maybe I’m getting some traction work-wise.

Okay. I just found the sunny side of the street.