Winter’s Wheat

I’m glad I ran into you. As our long winter turns to spring and pandemic restrictions are easing a bit, I’ve been hearing it said that we’ve spent the last year while the “earth stood still” pretty much standing still right along with it. And I’m curious: Does someone think we just been sitting around, doing nothing? Does it seem like we fell asleep a year ago and are just now waking up? Parts of the last year have been a complete nightmare, true. But, dear friends, you know as well as I do that we were never asleep.

Walk with me through the fields for a moment. There’s something I want to show you. In the fall when the crops have been gathered, the leaves are gone, and the land looks barren, that’s when a variety of wheat, called winter wheat, is planted. Yes, winter wheat, like the beer. Winter itself arrives and snow falls and everything seems to be on hold. Oh, but it’s not. One day when the snow melts, these surprising green tufts of wheat are already there, having rooted and grown all winter under the snow, out of sight. 

The task of survival is one of our biggest feats of strength. Distance, quarantine, loss, uncertainty, fear, and piecing life together one segment after another—these things take time, and they take effort. Each step, no matter how quiet or unseen, needs to be counted as part of the journey. Our journey. I’m glad you’re here with me.

For some of us, this work may have been quiet, but it has been some of the most important work we’ve ever done. Our little rows of wheat will get taller and greener, but when they emerge in late winter, they’re already the color of spring.

The Expense of Today

My local bank has put up signs this summer next to each teller as some kind of financial promotion. Basically, each has teller was supposed to write what she (they’re all women) is looking forward to in life. Each and every one of them, without fail, wrote “Retirement.”

So now every time I walk into the bank I’m met with these “I want to retire, I want to retire” signs. It’s odd. The boss man’s is slightly different; he wrote something about cabin trips and margaritas, which is still an escape from the daily grind.

I’m sure this is just a way to get the bank customers to think about saving more or to think about our financial future. But I think about how this promotion is backfiring for me. I think about how the “weird” way I live my life–without paid vacation or designated sick days or financial security of any kind—and all in the name of art, is exactly where I need to be.

Sure, I should save more. But it seems the moment I have some monetary substance to my life, I find that that’s the exact sum I need to go see a remote part of the world, or to take a class with a Master on a topic, or even just to buy a book and some tools so I can fix it myself. I buy experience. And it all finds its way into the writing.

It’s not an easy life, and that’s why I put heart and soul into the writing I do, because those are the things for which I’ve saved and spent: heart and soul.

Don’t get me wrong; planning for the future is important. I still plan. But not at the expense of today. At the age of 24 I declared myself semi-retired because I didn’t want to wait until I was 65 (or, these days, 70) to make time for what I love.

The last thing I ever wanted was to seek tomorrow at the expense of today.

~
Jody Brown is the author of Upside Down Kingdom, and is a blogger, poet, and traveler. To learn more about her current writing projects, or for ways to donate toward their completion, see JodyBrown.com/writing.

The Paths We Take (featuring Dr. Daniel Drubach)

I’ve said for years that the worst day writing is still better than the best day working at anything else. That doesn’t make it easy, of course, but the fact that I have discovered this about myself (mostly by working at all sorts of other jobs, successfully, even), gives me comfort. Of all the paths out there, this one, I get to walk.

At the moment, I’m reading Dr. Daniel Drubach’s Silent Sinners, Silent Saints, which begins with a bang. My friend Patrick tracked down this book and gave it to me after reading it himself. His advice was to read it a chapter at a time, and let it sink in. I was hoping to devour it quickly, so that when I see Daniel at his next musical gig in two weeks, I can proudly tell him I read this book (he read my book, as per our agreement, and I’m behind).

I’ve tried telling him that it’s not personal, I just work a lot, but he gives me a skeptical look. It’s true, but I’m preaching to the choir. Daniel travels, plays music, has written a few books, is rumored to have his own TED Talk coming up, and is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the local medical outfit down the street, what was it called again? Oh, right, the Mayo Clinic.  Being “busy” in Rochester is completely subjective. This town!

Getting back to the bang, the first full chapter of Silent Saints, Silent Sinners, is called Maria and David, and it is so amazingly good, written in a way to draw you in and quietly drop a bombshell on you.  Reading it, I did have to put the book down to let it sink in, as Patrick said.

Maria and David’s chapter will pull at your heart. Life doesn’t have to be lucrative, powerful, or popular. It just has to be the right life for you. For me, it started with figuring out that the worst day writing was still better than my best day working at anything else.

Silent Sinners, Silent Saints is available on Amazon.

Posted with the permission of my friend, Dr. Daniel Drubach

~

Jody Brown is a fiction writer, multi-blogger, columnist, poet, dreamer, and traveler.

The Monster’s Wake

I’m exercising my dark humor here, but I assure you, it ends well.

I’m posting this excerpt because I paid my new health insurance premium this week. And rather than rant about how I must have “Sucker” printed on my forehead, and how I believe that people in suits who’ve never paid for their own health insurance in their lives need not dictate how much the rest of us can afford to pay, I thought I’d rant better than that. I don’t have the answers. I paid the dumb bill. Oh, but I hear the call to action.

Hell’s Suburb (excerpt, December 2013)

“A” never talks to “B” here. There is much paperwork, there are complications, the necessities are numerous, and expensive. To live in Hell’s Suburb, one needs plenty of insurance in case one should try to live. There is car insurance, life insurance, death, home, health, pet, and, because it’s ironic, vacation insurance. People who don’t take vacations buy it.

The movies are predictable and the surprises have all been used up, long ago, while we were busy buying our insurance.  The thing is, if you stay distracted, you don’t notice.

We in Hell’s Suburb are surrounded by the undead, non-living, the dull, and some actors. This is not Dante, this is not fire and brimstone. This is bureaucracy, tedium, and lack of forward movement. This is a drone-like slumber.

We grow up listening to the stories of old men telling us that escape from this is impossible, but we were born with the childlike wonder to know we can. We armed ourselves with plastic swords and light sabers and donned our red capes and we knew better than the adults. We’d show them. We would be different.

So we’ll get back to the days before our inspiration was stolen, when we believed in ourselves, back to when our worst problem was the monster under the bed, yet every night we went to that bed and we faced that fear and in its wake, we dreamed the dreams of super heroes.

~

Pain in the Neck

This morning I sneezed and caused a kink in my neck.

It was painful and amusing, simultaneously. In the kitchen, my cat and dog stared at me. “Yeah, that just happened,” I told them. (They love dry humor. And they wanted breakfast.)

At the office today I laughed about how old a person has to be for this to happen. I spent most of the day laughing at myself—laughing and saying “Ow,” to be truthful. But age is not such a bad thing.  These little injuries ground you to life. They remind you that you’re tethered to this planet, part of the world. I’m living in the moment and taking things as they come.

Naturally, today I started thinking about health, mortality, and my own Bucket List. I don’t really have one. And that’s because every time something comes up that I should tackle, I tackle it. Instead of a Bucket List, I have a great To Do list for this life with many, many checkmarks. It’s semantics, but there aren’t things I want to do before I die. There are, however, many things I want to do as I live.

UDK on Amazon: dld.bz/bYuX4

A Second Look at Thank You

I can’t really speak for the real world, because I don’t spend a lot of time in it. But I get the impression that Thank Yous are becoming harder and harder to get, not just in writing, which takes time, but the verbal “Thank Yous” as well.

I’m just as guilty of it as everyone else. I blame it on being busy and running out of time. As a writer, I feel that thank you cards from me should be heartfelt and written through tears of gratitude. (I realize this is extreme, but it’s honestly how I write them.) As for verbal thank yous, I can fall into the habit that the other person “knows” I’m appreciative without my having to say it.

But is that really good enough?

Let me tell you, I do spend time in Restaurantland where Thank You cards are a way of life. I wouldn’t say it’s commonplace to receive these cards at the restaurant, but it is often. (Yesterday we received a thank you via text.)

When a card comes in, the owner passes it along to the staff. Cards don’t get left in the office or put in the safe. The kitchen has a designated place they post their cards so that the entire kitchen staff can read them, and the servers have a board in our station where we hang ours. (We keep a collection.) When a new one appears, we all gather around to make sure we read it, and we comment on who did what to get mention in the card. These cards remind us why we do what we do. These are stories of people, their lives, and moments that mean something to them (and to us!). We have a hand in that. And here’s the heart of it all: On stressful days, you’ll find somebody taking a moment to re-read a card and even sharing it again with the rest of us.

These words keep us going, keep us believing, keep us striving, even through the muck. That’s powerful.

Say it. Write it. Just get it out there, and often. Thank you for reading me today.

~

UDK on Amazon: dld.bz/bYuX4

Oh, Writers!

I received a card from my friend and former boss, Mr. French, today. (Well, it probably came a couple days ago, but I’m lousy about checking the box.) His familiar handwriting brought back great memories of him, his ideas, and his humor. I put him in my first book, Upside Down Kingdom, as the witty head-of-the-helm, Mr. Watters. This is one of my favorite Mr. Watters scenes. While it’s fiction, it did mostly happen. With Upside Down Kingdom, the closer you got to the truth, the more bizarre it got. Be sure to check out Amy’s reaction to a promotion, which is not fiction. Oh, writers!

…

“Amy, I want you to start doing the newsletters on your own from now on,” Mr. Watters said. “I think Chad’s input is getting in the way. And the company is prepared to compensate you for this extra work.”

“Really?” I was braced for the worst and maybe this was it. I wasn’t being fired after all, not being set free, forced to abandon my lease, rid of hearing Chad complain about me every day. I was being given a raise.

“Thank you. I’ve already got a jumpstart on the newsletter,” I assured him.

“I figured as much. Chad has been reporting to me how difficult it is to work with you on the newsletters. But when I ask you to draft letters or anything of the kind for me, they’re always top-notch. Then Chad comes to me with some changes, and I could tell these changes had ‘Amy’ written all over them. I let him play his game. But taking credit for someone else’s ideas, that’s a no-no. That’s why he’s in Brussels right now.”

“What do you mean?”

He laughed. “It’s a little ploy Harvey and I invented. This week as you know, the House is set to vote on the retail legislation. There are two key Members that we have to sway our way. Harvey and his team have one, and I’m working with the Hill office on the other. But with Chad following my every step, calling the Hill office every hour for updates, wanting to talk about the upcoming election predictions, it’s a nuisance and a distraction. The kid needed a vacation, so I sent him to one of Harvey’s cousins in Brussels for a ruse.”

“A ruse?”

“He’s going to pitch Watters and Company to Larson Jones, Ted Harvey’s cousin, and get a week out of my sight in the process.”

“You just paid for him to have a vacation?” This was ludicrous and I couldn’t help it, “Send me on vacation!”

“I can’t do that. You’d enjoy yourself. Chad’s not going to have any fun—it’s not his way.”

~

Thank you, Mr. French, for a great walk down memory lane!

Traits of the Cold

It’s mighty cold out there. The buzz in Rochester, Minnesota, is that we’re 3 degrees off of the current Alaska temps right now. Why do we live here? Well, I thought up some ways the extreme cold awakens our sense of wonder, kinship, and helps us live each day to the fullest:

• We can toss boiling water into the air and watch it crystalize, as I tried for the first time last night. I was told it takes a standing temp of -15 to make it work. No worries there. I splashed the water out of the cup and it made a great “Ffffttt!” sound and was carried away on the bitter wind like a cloud. Breath-taking.

• We can’t have an awkward silence with anyone we don’t know well. We all talk about the weather. We can always talk about the weather. Great friendships and bowling leagues get started with perfect strangers because of the weather.

• My personal favorite: Trying to maintain body heat is calorie-burning. That means we can all eat more this week–just to be safe, of course.

• We live in the moment. We can’t worry much about tomorrow when we’re living with a high of -20 and a wind chill of -55 today. The days don’t blend one into another; each one takes focus. Keeping loved ones and pets out of the cold, layering and layering our clothes, finding hot beverages (especially spiked hot beverages as Renaissance woman Dawn Sanborn posted on FB today), keeping the house heated–these are the things we’re concerned with today. We’ll get to tomorrow later.

So live in the moment. Grab another slice of cake, sip your hot toddy, put on a third sweater, and snuggle up with loved ones. In a few days we’ll be back to 20 above zero, walking around without our coats and making the rest of the country scratch their heads at us.

~

UDK on Amazon: dld.bz/bYuX4

The Black and Gold Lives On

As my Packer friends bundle up and head toward what could be the Next Ice Bowl, we here in Steeler Nation are packing up our black and gold holiday items and hunkering down for the offseason.

And though, in the end there, most things went right to get us a playoff spot as a wildcard, alas, when you need the Pythagorean Theorem to get you to the post-season, you are clearly not in control of your own fate. That aside, this has become what I like to call a Gear Year. It’s in these rare seasons that we don’t make the playoffs that Steeler fans are able to pick up our Steeler gear at deep discounts. Jackets, sweatpants, mugs, calendars, night lights, shower curtains, hats, Terrible Towels, and even this holiday wreath that I picked up between Super Bowls—everything is super marked down to affordable levels.

But, never fear. As we gather our gear we’ll be studying tactics and gearing up for another season of armchair quarterbacking. The Black and Gold lives on. See you all next season—when I’m sure we won’t be so lenient.

~

Jody Brown writes for the sheer fun of it. www.JodyBrown.com

Storytellers

I’m often asked what made me want to write a book. Time after time, I found that question strange but I couldn’t pinpoint why.

Walk with me a little: I always knew I wanted to write, and I remember writing short stories and poems during recess and even a murder mystery that took weeks of playground time to complete. (My babysitter was the only one to read the first draft of the mystery. She figured out whodunit by page 2, and I realized, painfully, that I had to rewrite the whole thing. So I did.)

There were times when I knew I would always write, and times that I could sense a choice coming between writing and working at a career that would pay the bills. One such time, a friend said to me, “Keep going with your writing. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.” This friend started her own business and works hard at it, which made this not just any advice, but advice I could believe in.

My good writing days always amaze me. My bad ones tend to leave me with puzzles to solve, which isn’t such a bad thing. I had a conversation about this yesterday that went a little something like:

My friend Brian: Jody, how’s the writing going?

Me: Pretty good. I finished a blog and two articles this week but still haven’t written one of my characters out of the cab I put him into a couple weeks ago. It’s getting frustrating.

Brian: Oh, okay.

Today I realize the problem is that my cab character may not be going where I think he’s going. I’ll meander here a second, remembering the first time I spoke to a classroom studying my book in which one student asked, “But you write them. Shouldn’t they do what you tell them to do?”

“Yes, they should,” I told her, and I laughed despite myself. “But they don’t—not all the time. Imagine putting your entire family in a room together for a party. You know these people well, and you know they don’t all get along. But will Cousin Betsy start shouting about politics or will Uncle Dan play music this time and they’ll dance on the tables ‘til his pants split? I simply set the scene and I wait.”

In fact, I look at most situations in life and ask, “How will I write about this?” From childhood memories to weddings and funerals to the sound of my neighbor’s muffler (a cross between a faraway crop duster and a maddening low frequency hum trapped in a cave), I work on descriptions. I thought everybody did. So before I conclude our walk and I return to sitting in the cab with my character again, I’ll finally get to the point I was making earlier. When I’m asked what made me want to write a book, I say, “Doesn’t everyone?”

This answer drives at the heart of what I really believe, that from sitting around the dinner table, to making a phone call home, we’re a world of communicators–and not just to impart information to each other, we change the stories based on the audience. Think about how you can take the same story and tell it to your Grandma one way so she appreciates the irony in it, and tell it a slightly different way to your kids, so they laugh at the right parts.

Let’s face it: We’re storytellers.

The question is not so much “Why write?” as it’s, “What took you so long?”

Imagine the possibilities with a question like that…

~
Upside Down Kingdom is available on Amazon.