The Scribble Pad - Roslyn's Blog
Thursday July 11 - Old friends
Had one of those awful, multi-character, multi-scene dreams that just go on and on like a soap opera, in which I dreamed my father had died. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought, "That was awful! Thank God I was only dreaming!" Then I remembered...oh...okay...
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I've decided to blow away the cobwebs of my mind by cleaning out my study. This semi-annual event is not as easy as it sounds, given that I have several hundred books that each needs to be taken down, wiped with a damp cloth and laid out on my table to dry for several hours to keep them from getting mouldy. So day after day, night after night, I haul out armloads of books and wipe them up like babies' bottoms.
Each time, I re-discover old treasures, like a dictionary of phrases that my grandfather won as a school prize in 1925, or a How-To book that belonged to his father. And each time, I re-discover books that I know I'll never use again, but which I hang onto because...well, they're old friends. You don't just spit out old friends, do you?
Read my previous blog entry - Whispers
Sex and Obeah
From time to time I'll feature a sort story from my unpublished collection, Sex and Obeah. I'll start off with Smiling Lessons. A very sweet story, always a favourite of mine. As an aside, the character Rebbie, who like to look like candy, was the foundation for Candy Don't Come in Gray.
SMILING LESSONS
Warren Tyrone grew up surrounded by women. The family’s small concrete house, which abutted a field in the small eastern Trinidadian town of Sangre Grande, was home to his grandmother, Marion, a stocky bandy-legged dirt farmer with a love for donkey-rope tobacco. Two aunts, who commuted daily to their jobs as sales clerks in Arima, and his mother also shared the unpainted four-room building.
Warren’s mother was a woman well into her middle years, who shared her own mother’s physique. She was short and sturdy, like a deeply rooted tree trunk, legs splayed far apart, feet set at sharp angles from each other. She and her mother spent their days, from the moment of their rising at four-thirty, to their return to the house at dusk, hacking out a living from the stubborn red dirt upon which their crops squatted. This season, they had planted eggplant. Other seasons, there were tomatoes, ochroes or perhaps peppers, all short crops guaranteeing the swiftest possible turnover.
His father, whom Warren had met but could not remember, had despaired quite early of the game of fatherhood, and had hopped a Canadian cruise ship as a kitchen steward, mouthing promises of foreign currency upon his return. Warren’s mother nodded solemnly and spent her last few dollars on some warm woolen socks to give him as a going-away present. That year she received a Christmas card with a folded ten-dollar bill in it: their first and only correspondence.
Warren also grew up surrounded by the paraphernalia of women. When he was five his mother deemed him old enough to bathe on his own, and ceased sponging him down at the outside pipe. Warren began using the inside bathroom with pride, and not a little trepidation.
Simona Taylor's 50-Book Challenge
One year. 50 books. No bullshit.
July 20
Book #28 is The Angostura Historical Digest of Trinidad and Tobago by Gerard A. Besson
This one's so long and complex I'm tempted to call it two books...but I won't. Anyway, it was interesting. I learned more stuff about my own country from this one book than I did in years of history lessons, which I pretty much hated.
Probably the most outstanding thing I retained from it is that, contrary to popular (or maybe just my) belief, not every black person in the Caribbean is the descendant of a slave. Lots of black people actually volunteered to come from Africa to find work. Many of them were free and had their own businesses. That's nice to know!
True A Day
A brand new story every day about crazy (and sometimes stupid) people doing crazy (and sometimes stupid) things.
(You might see random question marks all over the place. Don't ask me!)
What's the reading level of my site?
Found this strange little doohickey on a site. It's a little programme that analyses the content of your site and calculates the reading level required to fully understand it. As it turns out, mine is at the Elementary School level.
Stop laughing. This is not a bad thing. In fact, I'm pretty proud of it. The Elementary or early Secondary levels are the ideal level for most writing. It means I write with clarity and precision, and most people get what I'm saying right off.
So cheers!
Last updated Sunday, July 20, 2008
