Day 7 - The Project

Image from Michael Holden on Flickr

This evening I attended a Toastmasters meeting where the theme for the meeting was New Beginnings. It seemed appropriate. We are in a new year. The club is meeting in a new location. And on Saturday I got myself a new hairstyle.

The Table Topics question assigned to me was to tell about one of my goals for the new year, an opportunity to describe my 365 Project.  I find that telling someone else about a goal is one of the best ways to ensure that I follow through. Another member responded to her Table Topics question by describing a writers' group she joined that will be meeting through the next month. And a third member described a writing course she is teaching later this month.

Those coincidences made me decide to expand further on my goals for this project. The primary goal is for me to establish the habit of writing every day, but I also hope that others will consider writing more, too. So in addition to writing pieces that may lead up to writing whole stories, I will be sharing the lessons I learn along the way. After less than a week of my Project 365, I already have some to share.

Image from courosa on Flickr

The first lesson is that I am surprised that the experiences I have chosen are related more to my childhood growing up in Minnesota than from the many foreign places I couldn’t wait to travel to when I was still in Minnesota growing up. The experiences easiest to draw from are those I thought were too common, too ordinary, too boring while I was living them. And that made me realize that I should have started writing much, much earlier.

The second lesson is that I have to be willing to be vulnerable when writing about the experiences I know best – my own. It is possible that someone – family member, friend, acquaintance – may recognize something of me or of themselves in what I write. So long as I am unwilling to put onto paper – even this electronic version of paper – something that others may recognize, I will never be able to write believably. It has been harder for me to write fictional pieces than stories I have clearly identified as my own experiences, such as many of the warming up exercises I prepared.

Image from urbanworkbench on Flickr

The third lesson is that I need to let go of thinking that everything I write for this project needs to be a finished, final piece. I know – intellectually at least – that writing includes lots of rewriting and editing and then rewriting again. So if I am unable to write a complete story or even a complete character description each day, I still need to write something – in order to develop the habit.

I have added a widget that includes links to several of the online writing exercises. I added them for myself, but also in the hope that others may be inspired to undertake their own writing project.  I chose 500 words as my target length and every day as the frequency. If you choose some other target length or frequency for your own writing project, and if you are willing to be vulnerable enough to share your goals with me, I’d love to know.

Day 6 - The Trees

Matt was in the yard, looking over the lawn to decide whether it needed mowing, when the immaculate cream Grand Marquis pulled up to the curb. The driver rolled down the passenger-side window and leaned over to catch Matt's attention with a hearty, "Hey, there, welcome to the neighborhood." Matt walked to the gate to get a better look at both the car and driver, appreciating the former and trying to get the measure of the latter. "Hello, and thanks," he responded.

The driver looked a fair bit older than Matt, probably even older that Matt's father. The ball cap with a military insignia unit hid whether Matt's uninvited guest still had all his hair. The small amount around the edges was decidedly gray. And it appeared that the years had been generous to him, as he at least had had plenty to eat over the years.

"I live around the corner on Blackthorne," said the stranger. "My name is Nate. Nate Miller."

"I'm Matt," Matt replied. He didn't see any point in providing more information than that. A first name was enough to be polite and just might encourage the guy to move on.

"I saw that someone new had moved in," said Nate. "The house had been empty for quite awhile, and it looked like there was a lot of work being done."

"Yeah," replied Matt. "We are very pleased." He wondered just what the guy's point was. He still hadn't made any effort to get out of his car.

"I noticed that the old tree on the corner is gone. Did you decide to take it down?" asked Nate.

"No, the city said it had to come down. It obstructed drivers' views of oncoming traffic."

"So the city paid to take it down?" asked Nate, his eyes raised in expectation.

"No. The guy we bought the house from had to pay for it." Matt wondered why Nate cared.

"But the city ordered it to be removed?"

"Yeah, because of the danger to traffic," Matt replied.

"Have you seen those four big trees along Traveler's Lane, about half a mile from here?" asked Nate, without waiting for a response. "I've called the city several times asking them to remove them. But they said there is no need. Those things would do a lot of damage to cars on that road if they fell over. But the city won't do anything about them."

Matt said nothing. He wasn't sure what Nate expected him to say.

"The city won't do anything about those trees." Nate repeated.

"Do you live near them?" Matt asked. It was the only reason Matt thought Nate would care.

"Nah, I live around the corner, on Blackthorne. I thought I told you that," said Nate.

"So you did," replied Matt. "I forgot. I just thought you must live near the trees if you care about them so much."

"I don’t have to live next to them to see the danger. There’s a fig tree between my house and my neighbor and its roots are spreading out onto my property causing all kinds of damage to my lawn. I’ve told my neighbor I want him to cut down that tree before it damages the foundation of my house.  But he refuses. I dug up one of the roots on my property and it’s as big around as my arm. But he won’t cut it down. And the city won’t do anything about that either.”

Matt couldn’t think of a response.

Day 5 - Dad

Dad in 1940s

       Not long ago, I presented a speech dealing with my Dad's experiences living in a nursing home. It was a speech to meet one of the requirements for the Humorously Speaking manual, although the topic was serious and I hoped I would be able to convey the serious message within a humorous context. He had been in the transitional care unit for more than four months when he moved into a long-term-care room where he could get skilled nursing care all the time. The move from the first floor TCU room to his new permanent home was stressful for Dad and therefore for us. While he remained within the same facility, even on the same wing of the same building, the routines on the two floor are quite different, to match their different purposes and resident population. Those in TCU rooms are expected to leave the floor and return to their homes. And that had been Dad's expectation. Those on the second floor have transitioned from home to more permanent care. And the differences were much greater than we had expected.

     One simple difference had to do with meal times. Meals were served earlier on the TCU floor than on the second floor which means Dad followed the previous pattern and often ended up in the dining area too early for meal service. So he had to wait. That just compounded the issue of his limited taste in foods. After waiting longer than he wanted to wait, he would end up being offered a choice between two meals neither of which were to his liking. So food service and options became one of his complaints.

Dad in 2007

      Once Dad learned about the different meal service times, he stopped arriving too early. And since he was able to get himself to and from meals without assistance, he would wait until the last minute to go to the dining room. By that time, it was difficult for him to get his wheelchair up to one of the tables, especially if the open spot was at the far side of the dining area. So food service and options continued as a complaint.

       The biggest difference between the two floors seemed to be the lack of consistent staff providing him assistance. And that is how Dad's loss of independence took the biggest blow. Because the staff changed more often on the second floor, and because many of the residents on that floor had significant needs, Dad didn't feel the staff knew him as well and it seemed to him that the staff sometimes dealt with him and talked past him as if he weren't present. He complained that staff members would come into his room, saying nothing, and then just turn around and go back out. When we asked about it, we learned the staff were just looking to see if Dad needed anything and when it was clear that he didn't, they would go out in order for Dad to have his privacy.

       That issue of giving Dad his privacy led to some other minor issues in his first few months on the second floor. The staff who collected Dad's laundry - both his clothes and the sheets and towels - would come into the room while Dad was at breakfast so that Dad wouldn't be bothered. But that meant that Dad didn't know who had taken his clothes, some of which he wasn't ready to have taken away. And the clothes reappeared while he was out, too. His wallet and checkbook went through the laundry more than once.  Checking the pockets of Dad's pants wasn't part of the staff's routine as everything was loaded into the washing machines together. And small items kept disappearing - his cell phone, a small blanket, a suit, a sweater, and the remote for his TV. Most of them reappeared, but again, while Dad was out of his room so he couldn't ask anyone what had happened. The mystery was finally revealed: anything left on his bed ended up gathered up with the sheets and made their way to the laundry. In the case of the blanket, suit, and sweater, no labels with Dad's name had been affixed to them which delayed their return by weeks. The cell phone never reappeared. Getting Dad to put things into his drawers before going to bed solved the problem.

       The serious purpose for my speech was to emphasize how important we kids learned it was then to be sure we didn't underplay Dad's complaints. He wasn't going crazy, he wasn't forgetting where he put things, and he could still hear plenty, even without his hearing aids. Yet he felt too many around him assumed they knew better than he what was going on and their assumptions were that Dad was just forgetting.

Dolores and Dad

       Well, now things have changed. Dad has been in the same room for more than a year. The staff have gotten to know him pretty well and his independence had grown so that none of the staff had to spend much time helping him. His idiosyncratic food preferences are well-known to everyone. And all the staff members know Dad has a girlfriend, Dolores, who lives in an apartment that is part of the same complex (although she ended up in the hospital during my stay and is now on the TCU floor). But somewhere during the past month, Dad had another stroke. And while previous strokes affected his speech and his balance, offering obvious clues that something had changed, this time only his vision and his short-term memory were affected. These changes are not obvious to the staff members who see him only occasionally during the week. Dad describes his mind as being goofy these days, although because his short-term memory is so poor, each day he thinks this has only been going on for that day. When he understands that his memory has been poor for several days - even now weeks - his eyes tear up as he realizes he is losing memories through the inability to build them. He doesn't know who has visited him in the recent past. He doesn't remember who has called him earlier in the day. And I fear that soon he may feel that no one is calling or visiting him.

       I was able to visit Dad nearly every day for the past two weeks. Each day I would answer his questions about his age, whether he still has a car, who is taking care of his bills, and so on, and I would do so each time he asked me again. After answering about a dozen times that he is 88 years old, I started making a game of it. Instead of telling him his age, I'd ask him when he was born and then tell him it was 2012 and ask that he figure out how old he is. Or I'd ask if he'd believe me if I told him he was 108 (he never would; he knows he isn't that old) or if I told him he was 68 (that never fooled him either; he knows he is older than that) before I told him he was 88.

       I also asked him lots of questions about his childhood and earlier life. Only his short-term memory was affected by the stroke. His long-term memory is in fine shape. He listed the names of his high school graduating class for me one day and then was amazed the next day when I started reciting them to him. How could I know all those names, he would ask. My last day in town was also Dolores' birthday, so I helped Dad pick out a birthday card for her which he signed. Again, he seemed amazed that I knew Dolores' birthdate and he asked me how I knew. I explained that I heard her tell the nurse in the hospital room what her birthdate was. And that meant Dad learned yet again - as if for the first time - that Dolores wasn't well.

       I had to return to California this week, so now I call him each day. Because those conversations are much shorter, I won't likely be faced with his questions about how old he is or what happened to his car. But if he does ask me any questions, I'll answer each as if it were the first time he asked it since I know he'll hear my answer as if it were the first time.

Day 4 - Matt Wyatt, 30, Father

Image from Flickr by Wintersoul1

       Matt Wyatt fell in love with his wife Rachel about a week after her family moved down the street. They were in the same class, although he was four months older. It took him several years to get up the courage to tell her how he felt. In the meantime, he was content to hang out around her, to be her buddy, her best friend, to know that he was the first person she turned to when she hd something to celebrate or cry over.

       One reason it took so long for Matt to let Rachel know how he felt was the difference between their families' religions. Matt's family were Lutherans and his grandfather had been a Lutheran pastor. Rachel's family were Italian and that meant, of course, that they were Catholic. His parents and Rachel's parents had become friends, but Matt had overheard his mother talking with her friends at church, so he knew she expected him to find a nice Lutheran girl to marry. So when he reached high school, he looked around at the Lutheran girls at his church, at neighboring churches, and at summer camp. Even if he had found a nice Lutheran girl, his shyness would probably have kept him from acting.

       As graduation approached, Matt began making plans to go away to college and Rachel made plans to spend the summer after graduation in Italy, to visit relatives, before beginning her search for a job. Her parents didn't expect Rachel to go to college. They hoped she would find a nice Catholic boy to marry and they didn't consider college a requirement.

       A month before graduation, Matt began to worry that Rachel would return from Italy changed. He already knew how easily she made friends and he began to fear that she just might meet that nice Catholic boy over there. So he clumsily asked Rachel to go out with him on a date, not just as best friends or buddies. Rachel's response was to laugh, but in the best possible way. She asked why it had taken him so long.

       After that first date, Matt and Rachel were inseparable, until the time came for Rachel to leave for her Italian adventure. She promised him she would come back to him before he had to leave for college. And he promised her he wouldn't have any fun until she returned. Since he would be working for his uncle's construction company that summer, to earn money for tuition, he knew he could keep hmself very busy.

       In late August, Rachel returned and Matt asked her to marry him on their first evening together. They agreed to wait until Matt completed his degree. They also agreed to wait to tell their parents, at least until Matt had completed his first semester.

Day 3 - Rachel D'Avino Wyatt, 29, Mother

       As soon as Allison came through the door, her mother Rachel knew something was wrong. Rachel knew her daughter was shy around strangers, but unless someone else was in the house when Allison arrived home from school, she usually greeted her mother with a quick "Hi, Mom" before she headed upstairs to her room.  This afternoon, however, Allison raced through the living room without a word and bounded up the stairs two steps at a time.

      Rachel had never been shy, or so her parents always told her. According to them, Rachel was as likely to walk up to a stranger to ask what he or she was doing as Allison was loathe to be caught by a stranger's glance. Rachel hoped her daughter would grow out of her shyness, although she also had to admit to herself that her daughter may just be following in the footsteps of her introverted father, just as she had inherited his blond Scandinavian features. Matt would rather stay home tinkering with his electronic gadgets than go out for an evening with friends. But Rachel had known that about Matt ever since they met in sixth grade when Rachel's family moved to Seattle when the auto-parts plant her father had managed in Indiana shut down. Now they lived in Minneapolis where Matt was an engineer at one of the up-and-coming medical device companies. Rachel would have preferred to stay in Seattle for the sake of her husband and daughter because she knew they would each have more trouble making friends in a new city than she would.

       In the two years they had lived in Minneapolis, Rachel had found several sources for friendship.  They had joined a Lutheran church, a concession to Matt's upbringing, where Rachel volunteered to organize coffee and refreshments after each service. Before they joined, coffee and refreshments had been handled by the same three women for as long as anyone she asked could remember. One of the three made it known she was ready for someone else to take over. They had put out sign-up sheets to try to encourage others to help, but the list remained empty Sunday after Sunday. Rachel remembered a pastor saying that Lutherans invite someone to come with them to church once every 33 years, and her observations of the coffee service made her conclude that that is just about as often as each Lutheran was prepared to agree to volunteer, too. Unless someone asked them to, of course. And that is why Rachel's efforts were so successful. She loved meeting new people and having a request gave her an opportunity to call up perfect strangers to introduce herself and ask if they would be willing to help.

       Rachel also volunteered on Saturdays at the library where books donated by the community were sold at a small shop each weekend. Allison loved to go with her mother to the library because she could sit in a corner with a new book while her mother worked. That once a week contact with the public gave Rachel her second source for friendships. Rachel saw clues in the books customers bought about their interests, and that always provided an opening for a conversation. She learned about a quilting group that met Wednesday mornings from a woman who bought Hidden in Plain Sight: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. And another woman who bought several books of one-act plays told Rachel about a reading circle that Rachel was considering joining. Rachel's life was as full of people as she wanted it to be, with opportunities around every corner should she feel in need of more.

Day 2 - Allison Wyatt, 6, Student

       Allison was shy. At six years old, that was the only word she knew to describe how she felt when strangers looked at her, especially if they tried to get her attention. A big smile from a stranger just made her look away and down, hoping her long blonde hair would cover her blushing cheeks, as though not being able to see the stranger would somehow make her invisible.

       All her effort went into being a good girl, one who attracted only positive attention from her parents. Misbehaving brought the type of attention she hated, with one parent pointing out to the other what she had done wrong or failed to do at all. Just the mention of her failings was enough to make her want to cry or hide or both.

       Allison hated it when adults laughed at something she said. She would never forget how she felt when her mother laughed when she explained to the milkman that they needed more milk because they "had an ulcer in the family." She didn’t think there was anything funny about that. When the milkman joined her mother and laughed, she couldn’t get away from them and into her bedroom to hide fast enough.

       Her shyness made it all the less understandable that she chose one day not only to tell a lie, but also to get up in front of her entire class during show-and-tell to do so. Something brought her to the point of overcoming her shyness to raise her hand in order to be called on to share her news with her first grade classmates. She eagerly walked to the front of the room and faced her classmates, pointed to her socks and told them they were new. But they weren’t. She had already shared the news of her new socks at show-and-tell before. She couldn’t remember if it was last week, last month, or even longer ago. She just remembered that she had already stood in front of the class for show-and-tell before. And she remembered that she liked the attention. Or was it that she was jealous of the others who had shared that they had new shoes, new dresses, new skirts, or whatever?

       As soon as she had told her news – her lie – it was just a little one, she thought, and no one would actually remember that the socks she pointed to that day were the same as before – she realized what she had done, lowered her eyes and head and made her return trip to the desk more quickly.

       And then she started to think.  She knew telling lies was wrong. Should she tell her mom what she did?  Did she have to tell her mom? Would the teacher figure out she lied? Would her teacher tell her mom?

       What should she do?

Day 1 - The Project

Image from http://www.amandablain.com/anyone-have-a-
circle-of-online-writerbloggersnews-reporters/

       The purpose for my Project 365 is for me to develop the habit of writing more intentionally.  Toward that goal, I plan to write at least 500 words every day for one year.  In some cases it will be a struggle for me to reach 500 words. In other cases, the goal of 500 words will require that I edit out some of what I write.  There is nothing magic about 500 words; it is just a goal.

       For most of December, I have been warming up for this. Most of the warming up pieces are speeches or other essays I wrote in the past, so the exercise was largely editing the pieces for the new purpose. In many cases, I found whole sections of them that weren’t necessary to the story, so I got experience with what I find the hardest – deleting words that I had written.

       Most of the warming up pieces are complete – complete stories, complete essays, complete thoughts. With Project 365, the pieces won’t read like complete pieces. I hope this doesn’t reduce the readers’ enjoyment. I hope that by providing readers with complete pieces during the warming up phase, I have enticed at least some of you to stick with me, to read what I write and to provide me with feedback.

       Most of the warming up pieces have been more than 500 words. Apparently a five-to-seven minute speech, the target length for most Toastmasters speeches, require around 700 words, at least at the speed I talk.

       What I write will likely fall into the following categories:

      §  Character descriptions,

      §  Scene descriptions,

      §  Conversations,

      §  Essays,

      §  Memories,

      §  Journal entries, or

      §  Exercises from any of many online writing exercise sites.

Image from http://io9.com/5928595/researchers-identify-the-
kinds-of-exercise-that-help-you-live-longer

       I may even work on the same piece more than once, to improve it, to try out a new idea in response to suggestions from others, or to complete one of the online exercise ideas. For example, one writing exercise involves rewriting a piece from a different person’s viewpoint.  I will explore how my stories would sound if told by one of the other people in them.

       Here is an example of a writing exercise from http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/a-12-day-plan-of-simple-writing-exercise: 

       Day 1:  Write 10 potential book titles of books you’d like to write.

1.     Another Day in Paradise

2.     Someone to Watch Over Me

3.     Death Of an American

4.     Mirror, Mirror

5.     Always a Bridesmaid

6.     Please Pass the Potatoes

7.     Dancing in Yemen

8.     Behind the Closed Door

9.     The Price of Sweaters in Tehran

10. But What About Doha?

       I also plan to use the names and photos of children and staff from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in the pieces I write – a memorial to ensure I remember them. I won’t pretend to write their stories, just to use their names for characters in my stories.

       Because of my experience with Toastmasters, where evaluations from fellow members is a major positive aspect of the learn-by-doing program, I encourage readers to suggest improvements.  If what I write raises questions, ask them. If what I write doesn’t make sense, tell me. Use the Comments block below to share your thoughts. I will use your comments to improve my writing.