Nervous and excited - a little bit of news!

I remember still to this day what she was wearing – black dress that was just above her knee, stripey long socks and heavy black shoes. Her hair was a short bob and dyed a gorgeous reddish colour – she was beaming into the lens. Who knows what her name was – but she was profiled in the teen magazine I was reading, training as an assistant hairdresser and I was hooked – hooked to her style and hooked to the details of the start of her career and the journey she made to get there. I wanted to be a writer for a magazine one-day I decided, I want to meet funky people like that and tell their story. So that’s what I told them when anyone asked. I’m going to be a journalist I said and that was that.

Well actually that wasn’t really that. Isn’t it funny how wonky life can get. When did this clear path and dream get so murky? Who knows, one step there as I chicken out of the journalism course I am all signed up for after my school exams and stay at the same school to do courses I have no real interest in. A family upheaval as we all learn how to live without my wonderful father, limping my way to a university that I generally lacked any enthusiasm for and spent a good deal of my time drinking whiskey and hiding in bed. Then what happened after? Who knows, one job to another in my hometown once I had finished my travelling, hopping from one lame idea to another never really sure what I wanted to do and losing any confidence in my abilities anyway. In the beginning of my journey I let fear of the unknown get in my way and then somewhere I lost all faith in my ability. I had lost my shine and I was completely lost.

Isn’t it interesting though how we come back to ourselves one-day. Actually it isn’t one day; it is in fact 23 years later. 23 years on and I am living “The Alchemist”, I am back at the tree and all my wonky moves have led me to this point, have brought me back to remembering that article of the girl in the black dress and stripey socks. I am saying to myself once more, I want to be a writer. I needed to meet a husband the other side of the world who doesn’t get weathered by storms, I needed to find my place in Canada where you talk about your dreams and people say “yeah you should do that!”, I needed to build up my friends who show me real life stories everyday, I needed a child who would push me to the limits of myself for me to learn what was important in life and what I really needed to hold onto, I needed my writing buddy to tell me – this job is “totally doable for you” and I needed my local paper’s editor to say “I have made up my mind already, I would love you to write for our Island Style section.”

A Walk, the moon and a 6 year old boy.

Tonight I took the dog for a walk. There has been a real shift in the season from summer to fall. One minute I am playing in the sun with the kids, talking about walking the dog. I get my shoes on and fetch the lead only to find we are leaving in the dark. The air has a cool breath to it, which feels refreshing after a hot day at the fair. Peace surrounds me as I close the door on the shrieks of the children having their bath. Mumma loves this time. I wander down the street with dog, who loves to sniff. I’m not in a hurry so this doesn’t annoy me tonight, there is time, all is good. I look up to the sky and there is the moon in its glory. It is a striking sight and I wonder to myself “how on earth would you describe that moon?” “How do you try to capture that very moon on a page?” Doubt starts to rear its ever-present head, yes how would YOU describe that moon Caroline? You don’t have a vocabulary anywhere near extensive enough to capture what you see and there’s you wanting to write, ha! Pah!

There is, thankfully, another little voice that resides in my head. She starts to speak ever so quietly in my ear as my mean voice bangs on. “What would Jack say about that moon?” she asks, “How would a child describe it?” The voice is right, I don’t have to be a master of words, a professor of sentence structure I just need some words and a feeling, it will come.

I remember my boy this weekend, pulling up onto my lap as he was still in the process of waking up. He sits and inhales deeply. The boy has something to say, but he is 6 and still has to process it. There is a hold on the room. No point in helping or coaxing him, it will just drive him nuts. So I wait and I wait. His body jerks a bit as the words and the need to talk come before the air can reach his throat. His arms extend like a composer waiting for silence. Jack closes his eyes to speak and moving his hand on each word as they are punched out from his throat he says:

Christmas Lights
On
Fire
Lit
People outside

That is what
I saw
From my window
Last night

I don’t speak – but I smile. In just a few words he is sharing with me his delicious secret of spying on the neighbor’s party when he should’ve been fast asleep. He conjures up my own memories of doing exactly the same thing when I was a child and how much fun it was. I am thinking, I am remembering and I am realizing that my boy just made a poem!

Often jack will explain something he sees and I am gob smacked by the poetry of it. I need to write them down, I need to steal them, but I never have the pen and paper at the ready. I always hope I will remember, but like colic and learning to walk (well maybe not the colic), you never really do. So this was my son’s first poem and just the support I needed to carry on, plug away and write what I want to say, in the way I need to say it. I can’t let false pride and assumptions stop me from just keeping on doing, doing, doing. So ladies and gentlemen:

Tonight I walked the dog, as the moon burnt a hole in the dark night sky.