Carried away by a little Wonder...

But just because a record has a groove
Don't make it in the groove (from Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder, 1976)

I was out running errands yesterday and as I was leaving the grocery store for home, Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke was playing on the radio (on Ft. Wayne's Big 92.3, which IMHO plays more variety and has much less happy-talk and time-wasting hoo-ha than the average mix and classic rock stations) and I was cast back into my freshman year of high school (so many years ago!)...

It's funny how a song or smell or even a mention of something in the news can send you to another time and place...

I noticed in this morning's newspaper that this Sunday Elvis Presley would have turned 82; that also took me back to 1985, to the Elvis Presley Memorial Field Day aboard the USS Pollock (SSN-603), which I posted about a year ago.

Such reminders of my former lives make me sigh over the passage of time. No, I wouldn't want to go back; it's hard to believe I was ever even really there in the first place...

If I live long enough, I'll probably be thinking the same about seminary!

Lastly (but not leastly), while I was searching for a file on my external drive, I happened across some writing I did in my early years as a high school teacher (before 2004, when church and Russian combined to chip away at any free time I might have had). I wrote a few poems (you can find two here at poetry.com, if you promise not to critique me, and I tried writing free verse in Russian, but a native speaker said Russian poems are never free verse so there won't be a statue of me anytime soon in Red Square), started a short story or two and an eBook (entitled In Between the Dark and the Light, about a middle-aged, happily married man who begins to have recurring different dreams about a woman; recurring, because the same woman appears in each, yet different because each dream builds on the one that precedes it-- a series of nocturnal vignettes in which a man with a wife of 30 years develops a relationship with another woman in another time and place...or so it would seem...and the only person who could confirm such an affair is an 82-year old woman living with her husband in another state more than 1,000 miles away whom this guy has never met...in the daylight... (How he knows her identity is the crux of the story...). And while those endeavors remain half-baked, I found this idea I jotted down that's still waiting to go into the oven:

“You can catch the Devil, but you can’t hold him long.” (Old folk saying.)

There is a story (turned into a good Twilight Zone episode) called “The Howling Man” by Charles Beaumont, in which the Devil exploits Man’s desire to good (and his carelessness with faith)…

So I have a story in my head (that’s just waiting to come out) that involves the same sort of exploitation; however, it’s based on what each of us has in that “closet” where we’re so sure no one—not a best friend, spouse, or even God—will ever look.  I even have a title, simple as it is:  “The Picture.”

(What really scares you?  What are you ashamed of?  What do you think you’re getting away with?  Ever wonder if you can, someday, truly come clean?  Would you even want to?)

Suppose there existed somewhere a picture that no two people see the same way. I don’t mean aesthetically; I mean that no two people would see the same subject matter.  In fact, what if you stumbled across this picture yourself at a flea market or a garage sale or a consignment gallery and were so drawn in by the beauty rendered by The Artist that you just had to have it—no matter what the cost?  What if what you saw on the canvas repulsed or humiliated you because The Artist has offered everyone else (so you think) a glimpse of your deepest, darkest thoughts, desires, or deeds? Wouldn’t you, then, want to buy it, no matter the cost, just to destroy it?  What if you and someone else were looking at this picture together… Then what?

It’s still a germinating seed at this point and, well, there are a few bugs to work out (as well as some artistic lethargy issues), but I think this untold tale has promise.

And, if I knew you could keep a secret, you’d be amazed at what in life inspires me.

Anyway. But just because a record has a groove, don't make it in the groove... Finishing a book or short story and getting either published must remain on my bucket list for now.

Now you see me, now you don't. Just so you know, I'm not just another pretty face. :)

С Богом.