One day, a few chapters back, the ink spilled from the well onto the inside circle of the trees that which catch the thoughts I think. I wrote, “How far does an echo flow? The wind whispers out your name…wouldn’t life be more fun just eating ice cream?”
My insanity begins the moment I give permission to a passing thought to live longer than a nearby memory.
While the question inspired me to write a song for The Ronald McDonald House in Charlotte, NC…I continue to be plagued with the failure of locating the answer it reached out to snag like a fishing line scraping the bottom of a lake for an old tree stump.
I might have been given a partial answer yesterday; CBS’s Sunday Morning featured Mark Twain’s self delivered and heavily anticipated autobiography—the Southern Master of stories to be told sat back one day and pasted his vocals and fingerprints on recording tape and paper.
Some one hundred years later the echo has grown…to which I chuckle about, the way it sprouted leaves in the forests I keep is nothing like what the author could foresee when putting air in the lungs of a young Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn; the new wave doesn’t comes with a page but rather a screen called Kindle, Nook and IPad.
I won’t write about the book. I’ll take thoughts from it and pour them into your wandering eyes but it’s never been my goal to become radio’s Oprah.
The literary makers of pages like Amazon, Barnes and Nobel and whoever else is participating in the book sales race make big enough waves. It’s my ambition to find a seed and plant it somewhere on the paths you keep.
A great example! In this age of bit by bit tips and taps into cell phones and keyboards connected to computers that once took up entire rooms…communicating no longer needs face time; faceless beasts and creative monsters munching down on tiny villages without leaving the comforts of a weathered sofa or oddly shaped kitchen chair that was nominated to sit next to a desk you call your escape and yet you do more running around on the web than through the neighborhood.
I must admit and it’s totally an ego gone wild is this worldly quest to locate he, she, it or they who shall be named the first in everything. As much as I’d love to know who the first person was to eat a chicken egg…it really doesn’t matter today because most eggs come from boxes.
Blogging has lifted its fame to everyday. Julie and Julia starring Meryl Streep continued to introduce the average Billy and Sami to visions of sharing which enables visitors from far away places to be influenced to create movement. Walls stand straight and still because they are told, but what if they began to listen to those of us who want to move them?
While some believe Mr. Samuel L. Clemmons (Mark Twain) was our nation’s first blogger, I scream foul play! Writer, poet, motivational speaker and inventor Benjamin Franklin born in 1705 put motion into the value of a thought two hundred years before Twain. Benny without his jets would wake each new sun, wrap his tiny fingers around a goose feather and pen out hundreds of letters only to quickly run to the nearest printing press then hand each point of view to a growing uninformed world.
I can hear my Southern Baptist Mother who grew up in Northern Wyoming shouting over the volume of the TV, “What about the great book?” Yes Mother…
Blogging, writing, chicken scratch into a notebook meant to take notes in high school later turned into a love letter handed through two rows of other students to the person sitting third back from the door is, was and will forever be blogging.
Did you ever get caught handing notes to someone that bounced your heart around like a red rubber ball on hot summer’s day? Might you have been one of the lucky ones who developed a language teachers didn’t understand? Before LOL and BRB there were signs and squiggly lines and if you were connected to me the way the letter was folded was also part of the message.
Twain’s words, wisdoms and unique styles are what make a writer accepted or an object tossed aside. This voice though is his. No fancy ink to serve as a paint brush designing boats that kiss the shores of a muddy mile wide river. Not even a love story of two that should’ve never met but once they did all that could be felt was witnessed in the eyes of a world pushing our imaginations through their windows in the way of sneaking peeks off each evening while the sun set.
Twain…who was he? A book club this isn’t but there could be a sip of something that envelopes your method of madness and softly whispers, “You aren’t alone…” and isn’t that one of the seven things the human requires in order to survive? To be accepted…
“How far does an echo flow? The wind whispers out your name…wouldn’t life be more fun just eating ice cream?”
I will always believe in you first…
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
No comments:
Post a Comment