Fireside Chat: Are You the Joneses?

 

From Greg Steckler, my log home designer:

Lesson learned (and a good story) Dept: When we were young (8th grade) we lived at Neah-Kah-Nie [Oregon] and altho’ we had a beach-front home, we were surprisingly poor.  Dad was on the road for weeks at a time and money was non-existent sometimes.  Mom was a beach comber and brought back glass floats, driftwood, even seaweed sometimes.  She would have us go get a few strawberry crabs, starfish, shells...most anything and paint them turquoise, put rhinestone eyes and glitter on them and sell them out of the garage which she called "Restless Winds Studio ''.  To get customers she would go down to the little state park 3 houses away, walk up to a car and say, "Are you the Joneses?  I was supposed to meet the Jones's and show them my Driftwood Studio.”  She would lure them back and sell them something (like dried seaweed, painted and mounted on a piece of driftwood and make enough money so we could eat that day.

Years later when she was in Real Estate in Lincoln City she'd do the same thing.  Go down to the D River park and ask, " Are you the Joneses?  I was supposed to meet the Jones here and show them this cute little beach cabin that just came on the market this week."  She once sold 7 houses in a month and made $35k in commissions for that month (this was like 35 years ago).  Some of those folks became lifelong friends and were multiple repeat clients.  By then she could have all her teeth fixed, had a Cadillac, nice clothes, became a real estate radio personality and prided herself on creating relationships.

 

You never know, do you?

Isn’t it fun when you are looking for one thing and find another?  I found Greg’s letter in my email file from 2023.

Although I was fishing for a sturgeon who lives at the bottom of the river, I found a salmon frolicking on the top.

 

Your life Just Got Better

Passing on wisdom from Gary V. (Instagram)

If you have ever left a NEGATIVE comment on social media ANYTHING, all the energy you have spent, all the judging, saying they are crap, all that, you are only dragging in negativity to you. DO NOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE NEGATIVITY.

Mind your own business and celebrate that YOUR LIFE JUST GOT BETTER.

 

That’s hard isn’t it, to stop the angry retorts when your blood is boiling?

 

"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive." --Howard Thurman

 

This week I published a post especially for my other blog The Best Damn Writer’s Blog on the Block (psst, I’m the only one.)

www.bestdamnwritersblog.com/

I wrote to writers about writing, of course, anyone can tune in, I just wanted to address a post specifically to them. And then I had a heck of a time doing it. Good Lord, I mixed tenses, I kept changing the beginning, the middle, the end. It was a mess.  I thought of my grandson writing a novel and how he has changed the beginning about ten times, and I understand that novelists can spend years on one book, but a blog ought to come out regularly, so it’s more like Get ‘er done. The trick is to make it something of value.

 

Sometimes simply letting the thoughts drop on a page works.  Other times, you can’t push the river.

 My husband reminded me this morning that we are removing cursive writing from our culture. I remember in Catholic School (second and third grade only) how we made circles on wide-lined rough paper that still had pieces of sticks in it, and with a yellow pencil, made circles and spiraling loops rather like repeatedly making infinity symbols. All that while trying to stay within the lines. The purpose was to teach our arms the motion of writing.

 I didn’t know how to write cursive in the middle of the second grade. We didn’t learn it at my previous school, and my family relocated from Illinois to Oregon in the middle of my second grade.

 Thank heavens, my artistic eye saved me. I copied the letters from the pages tacked up around the room. Each eight-by-twelve-inch page had a letter, an “a” in print, followed by an “a” in cursive. Letter by letter the alphabet was exhibited around the room.

 Some say that writing by hand connects the brain and the hand. My aunt, a former schoolteacher, told me that writing by hand helps a child read. I didn’t know that, but maybe it better connects the brain somehow.

 Anyway, I wonder what we are losing by dropping cursive from our school system.

I remember, before I learned to write, my mother gave me a book of old checks to play with, and I tried to sign my signature after writing a check for a few million dollars—see, I knew numbers but wondered why my signature was only a scribble. My parents signatures looked pretty.

 Learning cursive wasn’t fun. It was hard to get little fingers wrapped around letters—something akin to patting your head while rubbing your stomach. But both are learnable. Years later, when I used to write fiction by hand, I resorted to scribbling, for I didn’t want the action of writing to interfere with the flow of thoughts. And it took some effort for me to adapt to composing on a keyboard.

 Tell me, how does it work for you?

 I vote to be like the writer who stood in his swimming pool and wrote on a tablet at his pool’s edge.

 But then turning into a prune isn’t a pretty sight.

The Muse Newsletter

 Expect the second free issue here on March 1, 2025

Oracles of the Day

 

“One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no “down” for the world, but only in every direction an “up.” And that this is an all-embracing truth.”

…It is also what “we grown children find it hardest to realize, too.”—Anne Gilchrist

 

Occasionally, I randomly open a book to see what it offers for the day. After the above I found this morning, I opened Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones, (1986) page 48 (30th Anniversary Edition), and this spoke to me.

“A writer must say yes to life, to all of life, the water glasses, the Kemp’s half and half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer’s task to say, “It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café’ when you can eat macrobiotics at home.”

Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the absolute truth of who we are—several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop those details from becoming.”—Natalie Goldberg.

At first I wasn't going to blog this week--declare Tuesday a day of mourning, but then I wrote my apologies, and now I can't help myself--well, I could, but I don't want to. In times of trouble, I turn to my computer and books for solace. I am passing on what I found this morning for the artists out there (all of you are) and those suffering for what they fear to come.

Before my last post, titled “I Apologize,” I began writing about writing and on being an artist, then decided it wasn’t addressing what I felt was important. I’ve changed my mind. Becoming an artist is important.

 Once, a prominent psychiatrist told me that writing is self-aggrandizement.

What an idiot.

I don’t care how many credentials he had, he still missed the point, traumatized me, and besmirched all literature.

If you have decided that you are imposing your great wisdom on someone, then you might be accused of aggrandizement, but if you want to become an artist—that’s a different story. (The psychiatrist disagreed with the writer of a book I was reading.)

An artist wants to express himself, which takes many forms—artistry is creative expression.

Art is where your heart is.

And HOPE is right beside it. We have to believe there is hope for the future. We have to HOPE that we aren’t all tied up in Plato’s dark cave, only seeing shadows, not the real things.

A scientist HOPES his theory is correct. A singer HOPES her audience likes her song. A songwriter, HOPES his lyrics ring true.

Every artist who sits down to his work begins the hero’s journey. Every time. Over and over. He leaves his comfortable ground to set out, not knowing what pitfalls will befall him. He or she HOPES they live to reach their destination, and they HOPE they have something to offer the tribe. 

The writer-artist doesn’t write to impart wisdom; he writes to find himself, and through that self-discovery, he HOPES to motivate others to do the same.

Who was it, Issac Asimov, who said “I write to find out what I am thinking?” Maybe it was Joan Didion who wrote a book with that title.

That is something my friend, the psychiatrist, did not understand, for if you follow Natalie Goldberg’s way of thinking that writing is a therapeutic experience, it might put him out of business.

Then there is old procrastination (Steven Pressfield calls it resistance) in finding something else to do besides THE WORK. THE WORK (your artistry) is scary, that’s the reason we put it off.

Hemingway said writing was opening a vein.

Liz Gilbert said to enjoy your creativity.

I enjoy writing. While writing, I am in the flow, and time is a no-thing. My demons aren’t as scary to me as Hemingway’s was to him. Or maybe he thought one must suffer for their craft. Published writers have an additional problem; they want to match or exceed their earliest work, which burdens them.

Steven Pressfield found that once he declared himself a writer (found his calling) and he sat down at the typewriter, typed out a few pages he later threw away—he was freed.  A few minutes later he was at the sink washing 10 days of stacked up dishes—and humming.

Suffering comes in the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

While hunting for a different picture I had recently placed in my files, I found this one. I hope that bull didn't land on his once upon a time rider.

P.S. Hey, it looks like I got my follow button back. How about a follow?