Theme

For the past several years I have, completely unintentionally (it's only now, looking back, that I'm seeing this), developed a yearly focus. Nothing so grand as Spirituality or Health or Kindness, which are all more like constants that I focus on more at some times than at others. I mean things like Cooking. Last year was a Cooking year. I had a recipe-a-week goal, which I followed pretty successfully until about September when I began teaching four classes a semester, and the success was mostly because I did the thing you're supposed to do when setting goals and recruited a friend to participate with me. But even after my cooking became more sporadic, I still found myself being more adventurous in my choice of ingredients and recipes and cooking techniques. I gained confidence in improvising, discovered with some surprise that I really love making vegetarian dishes, and used ingredients that I have never used before in my life: prunes, tofu, chicken thighs, grapeseed oil, parsnips. This year was a Cooking year.

Past themes-of-the-year have included Movies, Books, Dating, Running, and Travel. None of those were intentional yearly themes. But each one of them involved some sort of big goal that just sort of ended up stretching out over the course of, and in a sense defining, the entire year. This year I'm going to go out on a limb and be fully intentional, and I declare 2012 to be the Year of Writing. For the first time in eight years, the thing I am doing with my life does not require me to do any academic writing, and so it seems like the perfect time to finally focus on what I want to write. The writing doesn't necessarily need to go anywhere. I just want to do more of it.

And I want to share more of it, which is a really scary thing for me. So to kick start the new year I'm going to share something I wrote for an independent study Creative Nonfiction writing course I signed up for recently. The assignment was to create a series of very short, self-contained pieces based on personal memories or memories of other people, and this is just one of the ten or so that I submitted. Short is hard for me (already this introduction is longer than the piece I'm going to share), but that means it was probably good for me, too. I'm not sure if it resonates the way I want it to without the context of the other pieces around it, but one of my other goals is to stop qualifying myself too much, and so I am. Stopping.

Hitchhiker 

          The fly must have entered the car at the rest stop while the kids ducked out to use the restrooms and mom pulled the toddler from her car seat and dad retrieved sandwiches from the cooler in the back. No one noticed the fly; they were too busy stretching and swapping seats and passing around peanut butter and bologna and apples and crackers. 

          It wasn’t until the car was back on the freeway and they had driven through five or six empty miles of Joshua trees and desert shrubs that one of the children announced the presence of the unwelcome passenger. Mom rolled down a window, and the boys waved their hands to swat the fly toward it. The older sister yelled to roll the window back up because the 70 mile per hour wind was blowing her hair in her face. Dad yelled to stop making such a fuss about the fly or they’d all get in an accident. And then the fly found the window and flew outside, and peace was restored. 

          Dad turned on some music and mom pulled out a book and the brothers crouched over a coloring book and the toddler talked to herself quietly. But the sister stared out the window and thought how small the fly was and how big the desert. Five miles to a car of people must be five hundred miles to a fly, at least. They had freed him, but he would never again see his home, his friends, his family. 

          She pushed her windswept hair back behind her ears and for a moment felt very sad.