Writing should be as easy as baking. The past three afternoons, I've made sequentially pumpernickel and two loaves of my wheat bread variation of Aunt Myrtle's recipe, rosemary bread, and double chocolate biscotti, all except Aunt Myrtle's new recipes, the rosemary especially good enough for Show and Tell. Of course, this is aside from the usual kitchen havoc of burnt fingers and flour fallout. It's also economical, healthy, and creative, if time-consuming--which is why stressed-out sorts spend money on fast food or prepackaged supermarket quick fixes or overpriced restaurants. Retirement has its smug virtues.
Writing is not that simple. I just read Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!, which claims writing can be, to the extent of tapping out a 50,000-word semblance of a novel in 30 days, using a few tricks but mainly producing the same kind of disciplined daily output that six-hours-writing-a-day John Le Carre practices. Baty's novel writing is intentionally worry free, without wondering if the yeast is outdated or the herbs gone stale. Simply that Nike slogan: Just do it.
So, according to Mitchell Symons' That Book of Perfectly Useless Information, 111,111,111 X 111,111,111=12,345,678,987,654,321. Similarly, I have long been fascinated with the Fibonacci sequence which produces the spirals of pine cones, sunflower seeds, the chambered Nautilus, as well as the Golden Mean/Section, recently used in molded acoustical tiles in Omaha's new Holland Performing Arts Center. (The Fibonacci sequence is simply adding two successive numbers to get the next one in sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.) As a word person utterly uninterested in the current Sudoku craze, I am still intrigued by number mysteries, by any mysteries, actually, well beyond my lifelong reading of mystery writers such as Dick Francis and Tony Hillerman. Occasionally I even become reinterested in simple everyday mysteries like how my peace plant converts the winter sunlight streaming in my kitchen's south windows into chlorophyll green or how my bubbling yeast gasses up my bread, but mostly I prefer the human or, better, the cosmic in astronomy and archaeology. The wallpaper on my brand-new computer is Stonehenge set on the Salisbury Plain against a beautiful blue sky with some wispy curling cirrus clouds. I watch every documentary I can about the site, as well as about Ireland's Newgrange or the Orkney's Maeshowe, those extraordinary astronomical clock structures built by humans 5,000 years ago, mysterious sites we will never fully comprehend, sun- and moon-oriented. Stonehenge persists in producing new discoveries every decade, it seems. Newer versions of these human mysteries occur in Central America's Mayan structures and, as enthralled me recently in a documentary, New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. I have been to mysterious Chaco, long before work in the 1990s, the Solstice Project, revealed the hidden equinox and solstice architecture and road system memorialized in three Fajada Butte petroglyphs. All of these sites weigh on me as the winter solstice approaches, not only a niece's birthday but the celebratory season co-opted by much later Christianity, as it deliberately took over other notable mythological/astronomical occasions.
So cosmological concerns keep me from fretting too much over my own mundane mysteries, such as why I can deliberately park off to myself and return from the matinee or bookstore to the parking lot to find my pickup surrounded by friendly vehicles who could easily have chosen other empty spaces. My pickup is much more social than I am. Or how I can snag a pocket on anything protruding such as a rocking-chair arm or drawer handle or crumple up throw rugs by walking across them (the latter is genetic: Dad did the same, so it became a father-son joke). Or why I have trouble writing.
I would much rather puzzle over, say, the mystery of Billy Hillberg, a very smelly character of my childhood who lived in a shack along the Bazile Creek west of Center, my hometown. No one liked to be downwind of him when he came into town in his old flannel shirt and dirty overalls, a burlap bag once used for potatoes slung over his back, tied by rope, into which he put his few supplies and many catfood tins. Unshaven, grey bearded, democratically pugnacious, old hightop shoes shuffling along unhurried. Usually I was forbidden to go near his place, but Marlo Holmes, two grades behind me, cultivated an acquaintance with him, their family store where Billy usually traded then. That's how I got to tag along once, only once, with Marlo and some other boys to see a fabled junkyard in and out of the house, narrow trails up and down on dirt through piles of old furniture and metal objects stacked higher than our heads to the rear living area with its old cast-iron cookstove on which sat pans and skillets, chairs, table--I don't remember a bed but know one had to be somewhere, up in a loft? No electricity, no plumbing (faucets, toilet), no heat other than the cookstove. Billy had rigged a cable across the creek with a sling chair that could be pulled along hand over hand, by which he could cross regardless of how high the water was. ( In the 1940s-50s the Bazile ran much higher than today, occasionally flooding destructively, before the farmers were building dams to catch rain runoff or running pipes for irrigation.) I think Marlo, who loved gadgetry and was good at it, liked the cable chair best. As suggested, Billy kept cats, several, which didn't mind his unbathed smell at all and purred around his feet and meowed across the stove (sleeping in the skillets) and out of the junkpiles. In fact, when he ultimately didn't show up for his usual weekly shopping for two or three weeks, Dad and someone else had to look into his absence. Poor old Billy was dead and eaten grotesquely by his cats. What mystery lies in Billy? As I found out decades later, Billy was from one of the better, fairly well-to-do area families with brothers and sisters somewhere and, the biggest surprise, had a college education. So why did he turn from that to a hobo subsistence? Now, there's an abiding mystery.
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