The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the Butterfly.
~ Richard Bach
As you can see from my Favorite Quotes page, I love quotes. If I had to pick a favorite, it would be this one by Richard Bach, simply because it has been with me for a very long time and has guided me through many tough transitions and challenges in my life. I’ve started surrounding myself with butterflies just to remind myself that life is ever-changing, and with that change, something new and beautiful never fails to emerge.
My stars! It’s really been 10 months since my last post?
Well, one of my New Year Resolutions was to get more serious about blogging, and seeing that it is now … ahem … MARCH, I think it’s high time I begin. I had a different plan, but The Universe in all its wisdom and good timing sent me this link via Pinterest, so I threw my original plan out the window and figured this might be a better way to get started. My thanks to Tiffany at www.fabulousfindsbytiffany.com for hosting the challenge. I hope to get to know you better over the next month. I promise I will do better with all the links, etc. tomorrow, but I only have 15 more minutes to post before I have to pick up the boy at school, so without further ado:
Day 1 – Self Portrait and 5 Random Things About Myself:
This was me at 6:00 in the morning when I found this challenge. Not at my prettiest, I admit, but I figure if I make it through this challenge, my reward will be to post how I look all cleaned up. You can also see what a wonderful man I must be married to if he has put up with me in this state every morning for the last 21+ years. Which brings me to 5 Random Facts:
1) I have been married for 21+ years to a very wonderful, very tolerant man who grows a pretty fine beard.
2) I have two teenage boys, neither with beards.
3) I cannot make it out of the door in the morning without at least one cup of coffee, preferably two.
4) I can’t whistle
5) But I’m a pretty good singer
Okay, gotta run. Like I said, I’ll link up better with the challenge tomorrow. In the meantime, welcome to my blog.
The next of The Girls in the Basement to be introduced is The Hippie Lady.
I call her the Hippie Lady, but she’s really a combination of a Hippie Flower Child, Medicine Woman, Spiritual Guru. I suppose if I really sat down to figure out who my Spirit Guide was, it would be her. And as I write, I realize her name is Ida, and she weaseled her way into my current work-in-progress, All That Remains. So she’s sneaky too.
The Hippie is all about spirit and our connection to The Universe and all things within it. She insists that my stories have inner-meaning. She is often skipping around in the fragrant meadows in my head with a flower in her long, greying hair, singing “Shambala” or “Rocky Mountain High” or “All You Need is Love”. She loves the smell of incense, even if it’s in the stuffiest of churches, and accepts truth and wisdom wherever she finds it, be it from the Bible, The Lord of the Rings or Dr. Suess – in fact she’s been frequently known to quote from all three in the same conversation.
The first, and probably most important member of The Girls in the Basement is the one I refer to as The Old Snark.
I imagine her sitting at the table with the other girls, mostly silent and smirking as the younger ones chatter and laugh and act silly. She looks as though she’s sulking, taking the occasional drag from her cigarette, followed by a sip of gin. But she’s not sulking, she’s just observing the others fondly and remembering when she was young and foolish. But life’s hard knocks has made it impossible for her to join in their fun. Although she appreciates happy endings, she insists on doses of reality, because she knows that part of life’s beauty is found in its imperfections.
I believe that her presence comes from my obsession with my female ancestors and their lives. She is the culmination of all the strong women who have come before me – my grandmothers, Juanita & Betty; my great-grandmothers, Mable, Bessie, Missouri & Maude; and my great-great grandmothers, the most facisnating being Ada, who immigrated here from Wales at 17, widowed and alone to raise my great-grandfather. When I’m feeling weak and afraid, I stare at the pictures I’ve collected of them on my mantel, and they remind me to keep putting one foot in front of the other and continue moving forward, no matter what curveballs life throws at me.
And it is the Old Snark who proded my back to my blog, despite the fact that I’ve lost a week of my goal, because the key is to keep moving forward, even if life distracts you and you wander off track every now and again.
I’ve mentioned The Girls in the Basement from time to time in this blog, thinking that most of the people who have been so faithfully following my blog (who are indeed very patient and loyal, thank-you) know what I mean. But from time to time I get a question about them and I’ve always meant to blog about them so here goes:
First of all, I didn’t make up the term on my own. I believe the first time I heard something like it was in Stephen King’s book, On Writing, where he refers to his muses as “The Boys in the Basement”. The idea immediately spoke to me. I could see my muses, my “Girls” clearly. But then I sort of forgot about them until I discovered a delightful podcast called Will Write for Wine, through which I ended up meeting most of my writer-type friends who also had “Girls”. Not all of them refer to them as such. My dear friend, Cynthia, for example, refers to hers as “The Younger Miss Bennets”, which I think is delightful and very appropriate considering how mischievous her muses tend to be.
I don’t know how many muses other writers or artists have, but I clearly have four. There may be more, but the four are the most constant and the most vocal. I tend to think of them The Old Snark, The Hippie, The Hopeless Romantic and The Fairy Princess. I haven’t gone so far to name them (after all, that would be crazy), but who knows, maybe someday I will. They don’t usually all speak to me at once, thank God. Various triggers bring each one to the forefront. For example, the Fairy Princess goes crazy for shiny things and tutus. The Old Snark likes to appear when I’m drinking Gin & Tonics, The Hopeless Romantic love sappy love songs from the 80’s and The Hippie loves hiking.
Over the next few days, I plan to introduce you to each of The Girls individually. Tomorrow will be dedicated to The Old Snark.
First the obvious – yes, I’ve already missed a day of my challenge. I decided to get that over with right off the bat. After all it IS a 30 day challenge and May has 31 days, so technically I’m still on track. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
And yes, Cyn, perhaps a little nudge now and then is in order.
Second – The suck part. I took a little brow beating from the two-man peanut gallery about announcing that my writing for this challenge will suck. Let me ‘splain …
I was giving myself permission to suck. This is necessary in order to move forward. If I start off by saying these are going to be the most amazing posts that anyone has ever written in blogging history, I will instantly freeze up and become incapable of writing anything. So that’s what that’s all about. But Cyn and Pam ARE right about one thing …
Thanks to a fellow writer friend, Pam (the writer formally known as Pimp My Mixer Pam, or Pimp for short), the Girls in the Basement (aka My Muses) have demanded that I revive this poor, lonely, negleted blog and challenge myself to post everyday this month. And since I haven’t heard from them in a while, I’ve decided to oblige.
But this is crazy!
This month is going to be nuts. My kid is graduating on the 26th. I have family coming to town, announcements to send out, a party to plan, a clothes shopping trip to take with a reluctant teenager, a filthy house to clean – all while waking up before dawn to sling coffee to the addicts. I really don’t need to be doing this now. I should put it off ’til next month, right?
Sigh. No, I can’t.
Here’s why:
1) I call myself a writer. Writer’s write. I haven’t been writing. That needs to change.
2) I’ve been reading Leveraging the Universe, which is kind of like The Secret with a dose of reality added. You can visualize your heart’s desire all you want, but the Universe can’t help you unless you DO what it sets down for you to DO. The Universe sent the Girls with this challenge.
3) I already told Cynthia I was going to do it. Dammit.
But like Pam, I have a few ground rules:
1) The primary purpose for this challenge is for me to start writing again and get the cobwebs out. I’m not going for quality. I’m going to try to be clever or funny or insightful. I’m not going to worry about grammar. No editing. It’s going to be a lot like the Big Chief writing in my high schools days where I would just put my pen to paper and write. In other words, it might suck. And that’s okay.
2) As much as I love people to read my blog, I’m writing mostly for myself. All two of you who still read my blog are more than welcome to read and comment, I’m just saying it probably won’t be all that interesting. Just ramblings of a crazy woman. Again, it might suck.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” ~ Steve Jobs
I know it’s been a long time since my last post – a lot has happened since then. Much has changed and it has been a pretty rocky summer for me and my family. But I will get to that here in a little bit. What’s weighing heavy on my mind right at this moment is the death of Steve Jobs, and my reaction to it. Granted, if my family had a common religion, it would be Mac. In our household alone, we have a total of four “living” Macs, two iPods, three Nanos, three iPhones (soon to be four next Friday, when my younger son gets his), one Apple TV, and several “vintage” Macs in our basement. My mother is on her third Mac. My dad and brother both have Macs and iPhones, etc. Over the years, we’ve watched Steve’s keynote speeches as if they were sermons, waiting to be amazed and delighted by his newest idea. We were never disappointed. One example that comes to mind is the emergence of “FaceTime” on our iPhones last summer. I will never forget the first time I used it to see to my sweet baby niece, face to face, across the miles, and watch her crawl across my brother’s kitchen floor. I missed her so much, and there she was in the palm of my hand. I was smiling so hard, my cheeks started to hurt. It meant the world to me. Only one of the many, many things I have to thank Steve Jobs for.
Nonetheless, I didn’t actually know the man, so I couldn’t understand why when my 14-year old came down to tell me the news last night, I burst into tears as if I’d lost a close family member. Even this morning, I’m tearing up at the thought of it. But after watching the video of his commencement speech to Stanford several years ago, and pondering the above quote from that speech, I’m starting to realize that the death of one of my family’s heros is more or less a culmination of all the changes that we’ve gone through this summer and now we’re left with, well, connecting the dots.
At the end of June, we shut down our business after nine years. The time had come to move on. We could no longer compete with the online companies, and we were sick of killing ourselves trying. What’s more, we found that we had changed, and we need to shake free of the shop in order to move on to bigger and better things. But that didn’t make it easier when we were packing up the place to move out. I found such items as coloring books, old gameboys, grade school worksheets, and Legomen – reminding me that my boys had grown up there as we struggled to run a business. And as it so happens, my older son was starting his senior year in high school and my younger one was going to be a freshman. My babies were all but grown up. Would it have gone any slower if we didn’t have the shop, if I’d stayed home baking cookies? Absolutely not. But it still felt like (and FEELS like) time had somehow run away from me while I wasn’t paying enough attention. In the all the activity and chaos of raising a family, running a business and trying to stay somewhat sane, I’d forgotten how quickly things could, and would, change. Businesses shut down. Children grow up. Goals change. Nothing stays the same.
Heroes don’t live forever.
So – what’s next? I made a promise to myself when the business closed, I would focus more on my writing. I took the summer to decompress, but now I’m ready to make that happen. There are a lot of dots in our life that still need connecting, but I’ve chosen to trust the Universe and know that we will figure it all out exactly when we are supposed to.
In the meantime, I will take Steve’s advice. I will not settle. I will stay hungry, and stay foolish. And someday, I’ll be able to connect the dots.
I made a commitment to do two posts a week this month, and I’m not about to fail already or I’ll just give up. So it’ll just have to be a quick post today followed up by a longer one tomorrow.
Writing Progress: Slow, but steady. I’ve been working each morning on my character sketches, which has spurred several ideas for new scenes, so that’s a positive.
Other Stuff: We’ve actually got a little busy at the shop, which is encouraging after a very long dry spell (as in MONTHS). It’s only my hubby and I at the shop, so we’ve been hopping. Plus, corporate taxes are due this Tuesday.
Last night, we happened upon a documentary on PBS about workers’ unions, most likely aired in response to the current issue in Wisconsin. It focused on the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike that took place in New York City in 1909 and the tragic factory fire that occurred a couple years afterwards at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, killing 146 garment workers, most of them women, half of them teenagers – the youngest victim being 14 years old. Most of the workers could not escape the burning building because the managers had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits to prevent theft. They either burned to death trapped on the ninth floor, or they jumped to their death.
As I watched this story I’d never heard before (if I’d been taught about it in school, I’d forgotten — the most I previously knew about the history of unions was from watching Sally Field in Norma Rae, so for all I knew, that’s when unions were started), I began to think about my great-great grandmother. Recently, I’ve become intrigued with genealogy, so I’ve begun relating events in history back to what my ancestors were doing at the time. It occurred to me that the Shirtwaist Makers’ Strike took place around the time my great-grandfather, H.B. Williams Sr., was born. His mother (my great-great grandmother) was a dressmaker. Her name was Ada Williams. I haven’t been able to find out a lot about her, other than she came over on a ship from Wales at the age of 17, apparently alone. Her maiden name was “Scarlet” which I thought was unusual, but it turns out that it is a very common surname in Wales. However, when she stepped off the ship, her last name was “Williams”. I don’t know if she was widowed back in Wales, or if her husband died on the way to America. At any rate, the next time I found her was in the Minnesota Census, living in a boarding house with her young son, Henry. Her occupation was listed as “Dressmaker”.
Up until last night, I’d romanticized my great-great grandmother as a tragic young widow, with her own little shop where she sewed beautiful custom gowns for the rich ladies in Minneapolis, her young son by her side. But last night I realized that it was more likely that she had worked in a similar factory as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, working hideously long 12-14 hour days in a hot cramped room with dozens of other young women like her. What is amazing to me, is that she somehow raised her son by herself, a foreign young widow all on her own, and that son grew up to found a successful furniture company that was later taken over by my grandfather, H.B. Williams, Jr.
Someday, when my current novel is finished, I plan to write a story about Ada. I will have to make up most of it up, as I know only what the passenger lists and censuses tell me, the rest my imagination has filled in. She remarried when her son was a young man, and my mother remembers her as “Grandma Tripp”. Out of all the old family photos I’ve gathered over the years, I don’t even have a picture of her. But one thing is for sure, she had to have been an extraordinarily strong woman, like so many other women I’ve found in my family tree. I’ve never really considered myself what you’d call a feminist, but ever since I’ve started researching my family history, I’ve been particularly proud of the women that I come from. It inspires me to know that I have their blood flowing through my veins, and their spirit in my heart.
Kimberly Foley 